


If we were meant to be, we would've been by now

by liminalweirdo



Series: Out of the suburbs, Into the city [2]
Category: Ginger Snaps (Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, F/F, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Found Family, Post-Canon, the cure works, these kids have such a hard time, they are all just doing their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2020-11-15 09:23:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20863922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo
Summary: After Ginger dies on Halloween night, Brigitte is just doing her best to keep living. It's actually going mostly okay until, purely by accident, her life once again collides with Sam's.Thrown together by fate (or, actually, probably just a combination of bad directions and happenstance) Sam and Brigitte delve into the wreckage of their shared trauma and attempt to cultivate a friendship that had just barely gotten started almost a decade before.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title is from Billie Eilish's _&burn_

**BRIGITTE**

It’s his voice she recognizes first. That soft, careful placement of one word and the next, vowels rolling out more noticeably than the consonants like an accent she can’t place only it isn’t. It’s just how he talks and she remembers it so clearly, so suddenly that it’s like she’s thrown right back into that greenhouse light, soft and white.  
  
She’s got her back to the main desk going through the mail they received that week to try to find the invoices that Alice asked for and failing but she turns sharply when she hears him, and then it’s like something’s wrapped its teeth around her throat.

**SAM**

He still can’t figure out Toronto. Mostly because he hates it and doesn’t really _want_ to figure it out. But anyway, he’s here because he’s supposed to be meeting a guy about some grass but his phone’s dead and he’s gotten all turned around. And a museum seemed as good a place as any to ask for directions. Museum people were knowledgeable, they knew all kinds of stuff: mummies and vikings and Haitian voodoo and what have you. They should be able to tell him how to get to Bloor St., right? He knows he could’ve asked a hotel, but the concierge always look at him funny and he hates it. Haitian voodoo is the current exhibit. He’d been starting at the signs outside where he stood smoking across the street. That wasn’t something they had in museums when he was a kid. He almost wanted to go check it out, but he needed cash first.  
  
“Hey,” he says to the girl in the chair at the front desk. She’s got long shiny brown hair and a pretty face. Her name tag says Beth-Ann. He notices that after he notices the hickies on her neck.  
  
She cocks her head at him. “Hey, yourself. You look like you need help.”  
  
“Yeah, I’m looking for the fastest way to get to Bloor St. from here? Preferably not by bus.”  
  
"East or West?" Beth-Ann asks, as she rips a map of downtown off of a pad she’s got on the desk and starts marking out the route with a pen, but Sam’s not paying attention. He doesn’t even hear her anymore because the other girl behind the desk has turned around and it’s like all the air’s sucked out of the room. For a second they just look at each other and then Sam manages this cracked sort of “Brigitte,” and she takes a breath that sounds like it hurts and kind of flinches. The plastic letterbox clatters to the floor. Papers fly everywhere.  
  
“Jeeze, Brigitte,” says Beth-Ann, half turning in her chair like she’s going to start cleaning up, but she’s looking between them.  
  
“Oh my god,” Brigitte says, and then softer, to herself. “Oh my god…”  
  
Sam feels like he should apologize because she’s clearly freaking out. And fuck, yeah, okay, fair. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know that you… are you working here?” Obviously she’s working here, she’s behind the desk. He feels like a fucking idiot but, christ, he’s got to say something.  
  
“What are you doing here?” she finally asks. It’s weighted, way too heavy for Sam to answer, because she means _how are you alive?_  
  
Brigitte comes around from behind the desk and can’t quite touch him, and then she does. Sam stiffens, but she just takes hold of his arm at the elbow and pulls him away from the front desk to the front doors then lets him go like he’s electrocuted her or something. “You—” she starts.  
  
“I know, jesus, sorry, if I knew you were here I would’ve…” What? Called first? Not come in? He definitely would have fucking come in. Christ, how long has it been? Almost ten years or something… She looks thinner, somehow — all that baby fat stripped from her face. Her eyes are big, dark. She’s looking at him like he’s a horror movie silence about to give her a jump scare.

**BRIGITTE**

She remembers it, clearly. The wolf attacking him, all that blood. She remembers the sound it made when the the wolf tore his throat out. And the scars… they’re there on his neck beneath the collar of his jacket. She bites her lip hard and looks away, jaw working. She doesn’t know what to do, what to say. Something’s twisting in her stomach, sick and heated.  
  
“Hey…” Sam says, softly, calling her back to this moment. She looks at him again, meets his eyes for a second, then drops her gaze to the floor. Her fingers are flexing, anxious tic, and she consciously clenches them into a fist. “You okay?” Dumb question, he thinks, of course she’s not.  
  
She wants to shake her head, but she nods instead, glances up, his hair’s shorter than she remembers, she thinks. She can’t meet his eyes. “I just thought—” she swallows. _Thought you were dead._

“Yeah, no, I…” _I wasn't._

Their eyes meet. She makes herself hold them because this is real, or she’s finally fucking cracked. She flexes her fingers and closes them again, remembering the feel of his jacket against them. It’s real. It’s real it’s real it’s real.

**SAM**

“Hey,” he says again, “When’re you off? We could—“ God, it’s been such a long time. _What did they used to do?_ He thinks, absurdly, because he knows. Of course he fucking remembers. “You wanna get a coffee? Or a drink or something?” Christ. He could use a drink.

“I just started,” she says, because of course she did. It’s ten in the morning. “I mean, it’s far. From— from now.”

“I’ll come back. I— you don’t have to—”

**BRIGITTE**

“Okay,” she says, quickly, because she’s starting to lose her grip on this. She feels like she doesn’t know where she is, in time. Like she might turn around and see her and Ginger’s old bedroom. It always smelled kind of like candles, just gone out. Her breath shakes. “Okay, come back.”  
  
“What time?”

“S— seven.”  
  
“Seven, right.”  
  
She nods, and the whole fucking room wheels around her wildly, but they’re standing still, her and him. “I— I gotta,” the end of her sentence trails off into a weird, breathless gasp and she turns and walks away, past Beth-Ann who’s staring at her with huge blue eyes, past the front desk. She doesn’t stop until she pushes open the door to the bathrooms. For a moment she thinks she’s going to throw up, and she’s on her knees in one of the stalls fingers reaching, clutching at anything just to hold her grip on where she is, and she realizes she’s crying instead. Horrible, wrenching sobs that’re coming from somewhere she didn’t know hurt. She used to cry like this over Ginger, but that was a long time ago, now. This is something different.  
  
Afterwards she sits on the lid of the toilet, trying to clean herself up with toilet paper, but really just ends up scratching the shit out of her skin because it’s so rough. She washes her hands at the sink. She definitely looks like she’s been crying but there’s nothing she can fucking do about it now. As she leaves she almost collides with Alice who’s asking where the hell she’s been for the last half hour and why hasn’t she found the invoices yet and it all just washes over her. She finds the invoices. She dodges Beth-Ann’s endless questions about ‘that guy’ and feels her stomach tie itself into tighter and tighter knots as the clock ticks closer to seven.

_He won’t show_ she thinks to herself. But she has so many questions now, she wants to know so much. She’s afraid to see him, but she wants to. She wants him to show, and she doesn’t because then she can just go back to her normal life, and this was just a weird fucking glitch.

No one comes in before they close and they start shutting down lights the lights. She lingers so that she doesn’t have to go out at the same time as the others. Security nods as she leaves and locks up behind her and she’s standing in fucking freezing downtown Toronto in December, arms wrapped around herself and people passing by her in both directions and she thinks _he didn’t show_. Her heart sinks, and that’s how she knows she was hoping. She turns to start walking to the bus stop, but then he’s right there at her shoulder, saying her name so softly she almost doesn’t hear him. He’s smoking. He looks half-frozen in that jacket.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she says. It’s easier to see him now that she’s prepared. Now that she’s had eight hours to fucking absorb this information — that Sam’s alive — it’s easier. “So, um.” Her eyes flicker between his. “Where do you want to go?”  
  
He smiles. It comes so easily to him it kind of breaks her heart. “I dunno. I’m not from around here. Do you _want_ to get a drink?” he asks. He sounds like he does. She remembers the rye, the smell of it, almost chemical. But she hasn’t been able to eat all day, and if she drank now she’d be wasted so fast.

“I’ve got a better idea,” she says.

He shrugs. “Lead the way.”

**SAM**

He follows her onto a bus. She pays for him when he can’t find enough change. It's crowded, so it's standing room only. They're separated by a couple of people and she sneaks a couple of glances at him when she thinks he's not looking. They don't talk, so he watches the city lights and headlights flash outside the windows. When they reach their stop, she tugs at his sleeve, this barely-there touch, and they get off at the edge of this fenced in garden. It’s all dark inside. The gates are held together by a wrapped chain which she slips beneath no problem.  
  
Sam barely thinks twice. She holds it open as far as it will open for him, and he follows her inside. He glances back towards the street, but no one’s even glanced at them. He follows her into the darkness. Their footsteps crunch against the snow on the paved paths and for a long moment they’re both quiet.  
  
“So, you break and enter a lot?” he asks her.  
  
She shrugs. “It’s a public space. In the daytime, anyways.”  
  
Up ahead there’s a light — a faint one, orange-ish, but a light nonetheless. It’s a hot-house for tropical plants. The door isn’t even locked. She pushes it open and steps inside and immediately it’s warm. Sam can feel his blood start flowing properly again and he rubs his hands together. She moves down the aisles more slowly than she was walking before, almost absently. Sam just watches her for a moment. She’s still all skirts and sweaters and heavy boots, but she’s different, somehow. She’s less uncertain in her movements. And the plants. Right next to him is a Red Anthurium. He reaches up to touch it gently. He’s never felt one before, and it’s not what he expected. He doesn’t want to follow her, because she’s as quiet, as impenetrable as he remembers.  
  
Instead, he steps into another aisle, stops beside tiny yellow and white Plumeria. Further along there are orchids, bromeliads. He stops as he passes a large planter of what he thinks must be some kind of palm, but he was never as good with the leafy tropical plants. He looks up, and she’s right there, across from him, her face half obscured by the plants between them, but her visible eye looks black when she looks up to meet his gaze.

**BRIGITTE**

Maybe she had to recreate the Greenhouse to remember how to talk to him. Maybe that’s what she’s done, but she can’t think about that too much right now. “Why did you come to Toronto?”

“To sell,” Sam says. “Pot. I uh… I sold the business to someone else.”  
  
“You sold it?” she asks. It’s like she doesn’t understand English or something. She doesn’t know why that makes her sad. It’s not like she ever thought about it being there after Halloween. It wouldn’t have been right without Sam.  
  
“Yeah, I felt like… like I was going to fucking die there, you know?”

Brigitte looks away, moves further down the row and, after a moment, Sam follows her on the other side. She hears his fingers against the clay pots. Leaves flicker in her peripheral as he touches them gently, then lets them go. She always liked how he touched things.  
  
“What happened that night?” she asks, softly.

“I… woke up,” Sam says, just as soft. “I dunno how much later. You weren't there.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“I don’t think so. There was no one else in the house… except…”

Brigitte looks at him sharply. Sam’s in profile to her. She can’t see his eyes. “I saw… her. Pieced it together… I… I don’t really remember much. I was in shock, I guess. I couldn’t find you or the syringe. I must’ve drove home, but I don’t remember that part. I woke up at the greenhouse in the morning. The van was outside, covered in blood. The newspapers said—”  
  
“I know what they said,” Brigitte says, quickly. That the Beast of Bailey Downs had killed Ginger. Swallowed her up.  
  
“The cops were on me about you for a while. Both of you, and Trina… but then they weren’t. I guess you’d been in touch with your parents. So I knew you were alive.”

Brigitte’s quiet, scratching little gouges into the wooden table separating the aisles with her fingernails.

“I waited for you, you know, for a while. Thought maybe you’d show. But then I realized that you were long gone.”

“Sam—”

“Made sense. I know what you must've thought.” That he didn't make it.

“If I knew you were—”

“I don’t blame you,” he says. He says it in a way that makes her want to believe him. “Hell, I don’t know why I stuck around that fucking town for so long.”

**SAM**

“When did you leave?” Brigitte asks.  
  
“Like… around a year ago. Sold the greenhouse just before that winter and… yeah, I... just had to get out of there. Before I turned thirty. It was starting to be...”

“End of an era?” She says, and there’s something in her voice that might be a smile, but he can’t be certain. “You’re still selling pot.”

“Yeah. For now. It’s not exactly the game plan.”  
  
“What’s the game plan?”  
  
“Still working that out.”  
  
She moves again, and he doesn’t, but he catches glimpses of her between the leaves. She comes around into his aisle and makes her way down it slowly, touching the plants the way he had been touching them. She doesn’t look at him.  
  
“I never got to say thanks,” she says, softly. “For everything.”  
  
That sends this weird heat through him. He doesn’t want her thanks. What they tried didn’t work. Ginger’s dead. “Oh. Yeah, you don’t have to.”  
  
“No, I… wanted to.”

Brigitte moves down, plant by plant, taking her time. He could almost reach out and touch her. “How long did you go before you took the cure?” she asks him.

“Um… three days, I think,” Sam says. “I don’t remember well. No more than a week. You?”

“A few hours after I left. A motel room somewhere. In Kitchener, I think.”

“How long have you lived in Toronto?” Sam asks her.

“About five years. I went to Edmonton first, but I didn’t like it.  
  
She touches the soil in one pot, then takes that final step and she’s at his side. They both study the stem of the palm plant in front of them. “I found this place when I first moved here. It felt safe, or something. So I used to come here, when things were harder…”  
  
“In the day time?”

“Mostly. It made me feel safer to be with all the plants, ‘cause… it was like the Greenhouse. You always had a plan. Kinda felt like I had one, too, I guess.”  
  
Sam is way too touched by that. And hurt, too. His heart aches for her, and all these years in between. How long has it been, now?

“Where are you staying?” she asks, interrupting his thoughts.

“I was gonna… get a motel or something.”

“With the money you got today?”

“Yeah.”  
  
“You could stay with me. If you want.”

Sam feels his stomach flip and he tells himself that he doesn’t know why.

“Ah, no, that’s okay—”

“It's like the least I can do," She says. "Anyway, I’m starving. There’s leftover Chinese food at home.”

**SAM**

Brigitte lives on the third floor of a five-story walk-up. He can hear the soft hum of televisions and voices from behind the closed doors. She's in 3B, sort of half-hidden in a badly-lit hall off of the stairs. The wooden floor creaks badly under their feet. It's sort of warped and Sam thinks there's kind of a _Tales from Outer Suburbia_ vibe to the whole place, but he doesn't say anything.  
  
She unlocks about three locks and has to push the door with her shoulder to get it to open. He thinks that suits her somehow — all sort of rough around the edges. There's lights on inside. That's what he notices, first, and then the rich terracotta colour of the walls. Directly across from the front door is a picture window, and he can see that it's started snowing outside, sometime between entering the building and climbing the steps.  
  
"Ghost?" She calls out. No one answers.  
  
"Checking if your house is haunted?" he asks, cracking a smile.  
  
"My roommate," she explains. She crouches down to untie her boots so he follows suit, then she hangs up her coat and slips away. He can hear her opening and closing doors. She shuts off some lights and turns on others, pulls the curtains across the window. It's cold, but there's a space heater she turns on, and it gives off an electric red glow as it heats up.  
  
"Your roommate's name is Ghost?"  
  
“Miranda. But no one calls her that." _No one important._  
  
She's pulling containers of food out of the fridge. Sam feels strange here, awkward. There's pictures on the walls — some drawn and coloured — they look like superheroes, some photographs: mostly black and whites. Some are framed and some aren't. There's a little trio of cacti on the narrow divide between the kitchen and the living room, one of which has flowered. "You can just take whatever you want," she says, handing him a fork and a plate.  
  
"What did you do?" Sam asks her, "After you left?"  
  
"I..." she sighs, leaning back against the counter, eating the remaining fried rice out of one of the containers cold. "I just... I couldn't stay in Bailey Downs. I didn't really know what I was doing. I hitchhiked to Edmonton, more or less. Ended up working at a hostel because they let me clean and do dishes and stuff for board." She shrugs.  
  
"You ever finish school?"  
  
"Eventually," she says. It's evasive. Sam doesn't push it. He just finishes dishing out his food and she holds out a hand. "You want me to microwave it?"  
  
"That's okay."  
  
Silence falls again, deafening. He hadn't realized how hungry he was, though, until there was food in front of him.  
  
"I went to university here," Brigitte offers, almost shy.  
  
"Biology?"  
  
"Photography."  
  
"So what do you do at the museum?"  
  
"Not photography," she says, and Sam laughs out loud. She ducks her head but he thinks he catches her face break into a smile just before she does.  
  
"Yeah, that seems to be the way it goes."  
  
They eat in silence for a while. She doesn't join him at the table. He gets the feeling she doesn't often sit down to eat. It used to be easier to talk to her, he remembers, and he doesn't know how to fix that. All those hours spent at the greenhouse, where he discovered she could be almost chatty if you gave her enough of a chance. She still has that same soft, low voice that he remembers, the same chaotic feeling to her hair, like it's bigger than she is. They used to be able to be quiet, too, but now he feels like he should be talking. There's so much he wants to ask, but all of it feels too big. Everything that happened that October had been so intense…  
  
He finishes his food and pushes his chair back but doesn't stand up, steeling himself. "Is this totally fucking weird for you?"  
  
She looks at him with that expression he associates — associated — with Brigitte around Ginger. All startled eyes, frozen like a deer in headlights. She lets out this breath that makes Sam want to take back the question. “It’s—” she begins, but then there's a sound, and they both jump. The door opens and there's this flash of white and the sound of three or four locks being flipped back into place.  
  
"You left the lights on again," Brigitte calls out.  
  
"Oh, crap..." A girl appears across the narrow kitchen divider but stops when she sees Sam. She's so blonde her hair is practically white.  
  
"This is Ghost," Brigitte says. "Ghost, Sam."  
  
"Hi," Ghost says, and gives him this enormous smile. She shakes his hand, and then suddenly she's sitting down at the table beside him like they're old friends. It's like a whirlwind. She goes through the containers on the table without actually looking at any of them. Her eyes are huge and fixed on Sam.  
  
"How do you know each other?"  
  
"We're..." how much does this girl know? Sam looks at Brigitte for help.  
  
"We were friends. From when I lived in Bailey Downs."  
  
"I thought you didn't have friends back then," Ghost says. It's so matter of fact, and Brigitte is so unfazed that Sam assumes that this is just normal conversation for them.  
  
"I didn't," Brigitte says. “Sam was—” she hesitates. All eyes are on her and she squirms beneath their gaze. "Different," she finishes, then turns away, running water into the sink.  
  
_Different_, Sam thinks, watching her.  
  
"Oh," Ghost says. She finally looks down into the containers. "Are all the rice noodles gone?"  
  
"In the fridge," Brigitte says. She takes Sam's plate away, drops it into the sink. There aren't many dishes — mostly just a few cups and some tupperware. Sam gets up anyway, because he feels like he's taking up her time, her space already. "Want some help?"  
  
She looks at him and he sees her eyes flicker to his scars almost imperceptibly. He's used to it, though, but not from someone who was there. Someone who _knows_. He wishes he'd worn a collared shirt. "You can dry them," Brigitte offers.  
  
Ghost has found her food in the fridge and asks, through a mouthful of noodles. "So why was he different?"  
  
Brigitte keeps her eyes on the washing. "He was the only other person worth talking to."  
  
She means other as in _besides Ginger_. Sam knows that, even after all this time. He wonders how she’s been doing. How she coped, afterwards. He gets the sense that she’s not telling him everything, but then why should she? They haven’t spoken in years, and she has no reason to need him this time around. She seems to be doing just fine on her own.  
  
Sam tries not to be sort of disappointed. Christ, he’s such a fucking _asshole_.  
  
“ ‘From the golden fields, he came like a spectre.’” Ghost says in a soft, wistful voice. Sam glances sidelong at Brigitte who presses her lips together and keeps washing the cup she’s holding. “ ‘Moving unnoticed amongst the crowded city streets to find her again…’ How did you know Brigitte was here, anyway?” Ghost asks, voice switching back to normal.  
  
_What_ Sam thinks _the actual fuck._  
  
“I didn’t,” he says. “I found her by accident.”  
  
“Wow, d’you think it’s fate? Maybe you were linked in past lives, or maybe you have some kind of karmic debt to one another. Or _maybe_—”  
  
“Ghost,” Brigitte says, cutting her off. “That’s kind of a lot.”  
  
“Sorry,” Ghost says. “I’m kind of a lot for most people when they first meet me.” She beams at Sam like she's just given him a compliment or something.  
  
“That’s okay,” Sam says, because what the fuck else is he supposed to say?  
  
“You’ll get used to it,” Ghost tells him. “Are you staying the night?”  
  
The answer, of course, is yes, but he anticipated the couch. That’s apparently not the plan though. Ghost, he learns, is in her final year at the Ontario College of Art and Design. The superhero drawings are hers. She lays on the floor on her stomach, surrounded by sketches and pens, and Sam and Brigitte sit on opposite ends of the couch. He can feel Brigitte’s eyes on him, it makes the hair prickle on the back of his neck, but whenever he looks she looks away. She was like this, though, he remembers. Ghost eventually disappears into the closed room on the other side of the living room and Brigitte, playing with one of Ghost’s charcoal pencils looks up at Sam and softly says “Tired?”

**BRIGITTE**

He shrugs, half smiles at her because it is awkward, he knows that. She’s trying to seem normal, but there’s this intensity rolling off of her. She’s practically shaking with it but she’s keeping it all contained. It’s been like this since she saw him this morning, and her shoulders are starting to ache.  
  
“Come on,” she says, “get your bag.” And she unfolds herself from the couch, climbing to her feet. He follows her. He still feels safe, she thinks. She doesn’t know what that means. He follows her into the room opposite Ghost’s, the living room between them. She turns on a light. There’s books everywhere. There’s a trunk beside the bed that serves as a closet and a lamp standing on a pile of books beside the bed. It feels lived in, but strange, rushed somehow, like she never got around to buying proper furniture. The trunk feels a bit like living out of a suitcase. Sam sets his backpack down inside the door and kind of cocks his head at her, tongue pressing against his bottom teeth and oh, god, that’s so familiar. “You can sleep here,” she says. “Ghost gets up early tomorrow, and she’s loud so you’ll sleep better.”  
  
“I don’t mind the couch,” he protests.  
  
She shakes her head, opening up a creaky closet and pulling down a few blankets that she holds folded in her arms. There’s more books in there, he thinks, and a bunch of chemical bottles and plastic bins. Darkroom equipment.  
  
“Brigitte. I’m not kicking you out of your room.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it.” Brigitte says, and then “Did you really find me today by mistake?”  
  
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I mean, I honestly thought I’d never see you again.”  
  
“You have no idea,” Brigitte says, very softly, because she doesn’t trust her own voice to be steady.  
  
Sam’s quiet, but he’s watching her. She thinks he gets it. Maybe. She wants to believe he does, because she can’t talk about it. Not right now. She swallows. “The bathroom’s um, across the living room and down the hallway. It’s the second door on the right.”  
  
“Okay,” Sam says.

**SAM**

“I’m just going to brush my teeth,” Brigitte says, and moves towards the door. He realizes he’s kind of blocking it so he moves a little. She ducks her head and moves to slip past him.  
  
“Hey, is she, um…” Sam hesitates as Brigitte meets his eyes. “Is there something sort of… wrong?”  
  
Something in Brigitte’s face goes hard. “You mean ‘is she crazy’?”  
  
“That’s— not how I wanted to word it.”  
  
“Why don’t you ask her?”  
  
Shit, Sam thinks. “Right. Fuck, right. Sorry.”  
  
“Don’t be,” Brigitte says, almost dismissive. “But she’s my friend, so…”  
  
“No, right, yeah.”  
  
Brigitte adjusts the blankets in her arms, eyes wandering the room. She won’t look at him. “Okay… um. There’s extra blankets in the closet, and… ‘night.”  
  
“ ‘Night,” he says, and she slips out. She doesn’t shut the door all the way after her. He hears the water running somewhere.  
  
He changes into something clean to sleep in because his clothes smell like the bus and the underground and smog and her bed is clean. It smells familiar, but maybe he’s imagining it and anyway that’s a weird fucking thing to think and how did he end up here, anyway? It’s like a dream, all of this. Brigitte, this apartment… maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow in some shitty motel room on one of the two beds, alone.  
  
He doesn’t, though. A sharp slam startles him awake. It’s still dark outside and he gropes around for his phone to check the time. it’s 5:14. “Ugh, jesus,” he says. He’s desperate for a smoke, though, and really has to piss so he gets up. There’s a clatter from the kitchen as he tries to figure out the room, bumping into the trunk near the bed which he thought was further away. “Fuck, ow.”  
  
He pulls the door open, squinting a little. Ghost is in the kitchen filling a thermos with coffee.  
  
“Hey,” Sam says quietly, trying not to startle her. She wheels around anyway. Her hair’s tied into a thick braid that hangs down her back.  
  
She laughs a little. “You scared me.”  
  
Sam checks the couch but it’s empty. “You guys smoke outside?” he asks.  
  
“You can open the window to the fire escape,” she says. “Just make sure you shut it again, or the pipes freeze and explode. I made that mistake two winters ago.”  
  
“Great, thanks,” Sam says. “Is Brigitte in the bathroom?”  
  
“Hm? No, she’s still asleep. She's in my room.”  
  
“Oh.” He feels bad. “Shit.”  
  
“It’s okay, we sleep together sometimes.”  
  
Something about that catches. Sam feels like she wanted it to. He stills and looks at her; her eyes are very dark and it contrasts hard with her hair which is already coming loose around her face.  
  
“I mean we have sex,” Ghost clarifies. “Not always. It’s an arrangement.” She smiles at him like this is just information anyone gives up at any time. Sam’s frozen. He has no idea what to do with this information, or how to process it.  
  
“O….kay. Well, I’m just gonna…” he makes his way towards the bathroom. Ghost follows him to the hallway. “You can shower if you want. Use whatever you need. There’s toothbrushes in the bathroom cabinet and um, there’s extra towels in the closet.” She reaches and pulls open a little linen closet next to her with a flourish, like it’s a magic trick.  
  
“Thanks,” Sam says.  
  
“She usually gets up around six-thirty.”  
  
“Great.”  
  
“Also, you can eat whatever’s in the fridge, except maybe the eggs. I think they’re expired. Also, don’t eat the leftovers in the bowl with the saran wrap on it. I forget how long that’s been in there.” She checks her watch. It glows when she presses a button. “Oh, shit. I’m running late. See you later!”  
  
She disappears and Sam, a little shell-shocked, heads to the bathroom. He hears the front door close and lock several times before he emerges. He doesn’t shower, it feels weird. He does get coffee and smokes at the open window. It’s still snowing, but lightly now. Slowly, the sky starts to lighten.  
  
There’s a soft click and the sound of wood scraping wood as Ghost’s door is pushed open. Brigitte appears with wild hair. She’s wearing a long t-shirt dress that comes down to her knees. She looks very small in it. She seems half-surprised to see him.  
  
“She woke you up, didn’t she?”  
  
“It’s okay,” Sam says.  
  
“Okay.” Brigitte hesitates, then disappears. She comes out again a moment later, wearing leggings and socks and a heavy, knit sweater that’s missing a few buttons, and he gets the feeling that she wasn't expecting him to be up. He also gets the feeling that they’re not all her clothes. The sweater is light blue.  
  
She gets a cup of coffee and then comes over, leaning against the wall so they’re on opposite sides of the window.  
  
“Do you still smoke?”  
  
“Sometimes,” she says.  
  
He hands her the cigarette and she takes it. Her fingers are warm where they brush his. She brings it to her lips and takes a drag, then taps ash out onto the fire escape and hands it back.  
  
“Thanks for letting me stay.”  
  
She shakes her head, dismissing it. “I kind of thought you weren’t going to come back, last night, so. I’m glad you showed.”  
  
She looks up at him and it’s only for a second, but Sam has to catch his breath. She pulls at something in him, just like she did back then. Yeah, fuck, he remembers that feeling. Like he’d finally found someone he could connect with, someone smart, discerning, someone who didn’t feel like they were draining him, someone who was actually interested in all the shit he talked about.  
  
“I’ve missed you,” Sam says. It sort of spills out of him and he winces and takes a quick drag before flicking the butt out the window.  
  
Brigitte clutches her coffee mug. She doesn’t respond for a moment, but then says “I wish I knew. That you were…”  
  
They still can’t say it. _She_ can’t say it.  
  
_Alive_.  
  
“Sorry if I freaked you out, yesterday.”  
  
“It’s not your fault,” Brigitte says. “I’m glad you found me there. By accident or not.”  
  
He laughs a little, breathes it out, then pulls the window shut. It’s quiet suddenly, without the traffic swishing by on the street below.  
  
“I can go, today, if you want. I made some cash yesterday, so.”  
  
“You don’t have to.”  
  
“I don’t want to put you out.”  
  
She smiles at him. “You mean like how I didn’t put you out, coming to you with my lycanthrope problem?”  
  
“That was different.”  
  
“I feel like if you leave, it’ll be another eight years. Or never.”  
  
Sam reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone, holding it out to her. “Doesn’t have to be.”  
  
Brigitte sets her cup down on the window sill and reaches out, taking his phone from him carefully. “You want my number?”  
  
“I can give you mine.”  
  
Brigitte finds his contacts and, after a moment, hands it back to him. She's only put her first name in. He takes it back from her, and it’s totally fucking surreal somehow, staring down at that little pixelated BRIGITTE.  
  
“Yeah, I never would have spelled it like that.”  
  
“Most people don’t,” she says. “Send me something, so I have your number.”  
  
He does, but her phone’s somewhere else, so he just trusts it. He says “I have a thousand fucking questions.”  
  
“I know,” she says, like she gets it. Like she does, too.  
  
“Do you want to talk about it?”  
  
“I dunno,” she says softly. She exhales. “When I saw you yesterday, it was like… like no time had passed. It was a lot… I forgot how scared I was back then, until I saw you. It was so immediate, like. I forgot where I was.”  
  
“I really didn’t mean—”  
  
“I know. It's so fucked… god, it's so fucked up, sorry,” she says. “Just… I haven’t been able to talk about it with anyone, and then suddenly there you were and it was like— I dunno. Like it wasn't _just_ mine anymore, everything that happened…”  
  
“You didn't tell Ghost?”  
  
“She’s not… even if I wanted to, it’s better if I don’t.”  
  
“Why's that?”  
  
“She’s… very imaginative. She’s got enough to deal with.”  
  
“Hey, so this might be out of line, but... are you together?”  
  
Brigitte furrows her brow. “What?”  
  
“Just something she said.”  
  
“Ugh, _Ghost_,” Brigitte says, rolling her eyes before she ducks her head to hide behind her hair. “It’s… an arrangement,” she tells the floorboards.  
  
“Yeah, she said.”  
  
“Why do you want to know?”  
  
“I didn’t. I was just surprised.”  
  
“Why?” she asks again, but it’s a different question now. She tips her chin down defensively, but her eyes are on his.  
  
“I dunno. It just didn’t seem like you were…”  
  
“That I was what? We knew each other for like three weeks, how could I seem like anything?”  
  
“It felt like longer.”

**BRIGITTE**

_It felt like longer._ And he's right, it did. She remembers.  
  
“I just mean,” she says, softening a little, “You don’t really know me.”  
  
Sam’s quiet, chewing his lip. He's not looking at her.  
  
“Are you disappointed?” she asks, surprising herself with her bravery. Sam looks up, breathes this laugh, like she's embarrassed him.  
  
But then he says. “Maybe.” He says it very soft. “Do you want me to be?”  
  
Brigitte, caught, cocks her head, halfway between amused and freaking. “I’m… not really looking.”  
  
Sam pulls out his cigarettes again and lights up, even though he just smoked one. Brigitte's heart’s beating hard, still surprised at her nerve. “How old are you now, anyway?”  
  
“Thirty-one. And you’re… what? Twenty-four?”  
  
“Twenty-three.” She pushes the window open again, just a little. “I skipped a grade, so…”  
  
Sam’s eyes flicker between hers. She doesn’t look away this time. He drags a couple of times, then holds the cigarette out to her again. “My age.”  
  
“Back then?” she asks.  
  
He nods.  
  
She laughs a little. “I thought you were younger.”  
  
“Now’s when you tell me I look twenty-five.”  
  
“No,” she says, almost mischievous. “You look thirty-one.”  
  
“Wow, thanks.”  
  
“You’re welcome.” She picks up her coffee again, but it’s getting too cold. “You seemed, I dunno, really capable or something. I’m still waiting for that to happen to me.”  
  
“You seem like you’re doing all right.”  
  
Brigitte looks around at the apartment, at her life, then back at Sam. “That’s just because I didn’t tell you everything.”  
  
He’s watching her. “What else is new?” he asks, trying for a joke.  
  
She smiles at him, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.  
  
“I have to leave for work soon. I can leave my key with you, if you want to stay here.”

"Should I?" Sam asks.

"Yeah, I think you should."


	2. Chapter 2

**SAM**

He goes with her when she heads to work. The bus is crowded in the mornings, and neither of them like it. They’re not used to it, both of them small-town kids. Even Brigitte, five years here, still isn’t used to it. She stands closer today, practically pushed into him by two men with briefcases, talking loudly. She keeps her head down, but he catches a glimpse of the annoyance on her face as she shakes her hair out of her eyes. She doesn’t look up at him the whole time but she’s close enough that that would be awkward. He tries to shield her from the commuters who shove their way on and off.  
  
Even with the bus, there’s a lot of walking, but Sam gets the sense that she gets off a few blocks early on purpose. He doesn’t blame her, even though it’s freezing outside. He has a plan today, definitely has to find work that isn’t selling pot because christ, he’s sick of that. They stop outside the museum. She looks frozen, huddled into a dark scarf, her hands shoved into the pockets of her oversized coat. Her nose and cheeks are red with cold. “Here,” she says, handing him her keys. There’s all sorts of strange things hanging off of the key ring. A soft, dark purple cord of leather tied into a knot so it’s easy to grasp, a small metal flashlight, some kind of flower encased in clear resin, a bobby pin that looks like it’s been bent into and out of shape quite a few times. The ends are scraped down to the metal, like she’s picked a lock or two with it. “You can drop them off at the front desk for me if you’re not going back before seven.”  
  
She trusts him. With her things, her home. “Thanks,” he says. He looks at the flower. It’s a thyme blossom, he thinks.  
  
“Good luck. Don’t get lost.”  
  
“Oh, I definitely will.” She looks uncertain. “I’ll figure it out,” he promises.  
  
She hesitates a second, then undoes her scarf. It’s black, heavy. It messes her hair up as she pulls it over her head. She holds it out. “Try not to freeze.”  
  
He takes it hesitantly. “Bye,” she says, and she’s gone, stepping through the glass doors and disappearing from view. Sam pockets her keys, puts on her scarf.  
  
It smells like her, if he’s remembering right. It’s a warm smell, quiet — like paper, somehow, and something dark and earthy at once. Patchouli or vetiver before it’s so heavily concentrated into oil.  
  
It keeps her in his head all day in a way she hasn’t been since they were in Bailey Downs. Maybe that makes sense — it was such a wild occurrence, one of those things that almost makes him believe that the universe has a plan. It makes sense that he’s thinking about her. He finds his way around and fills out job applications, actually gets one or two interviews. It blurs together. He gets cash out of the bank so he can pay Brigitte back for the busses and, maybe, for food tonight if she’ll let him. He thinks about her and Ghost, which is just as mystifying to him as Brigitte and Ginger were, but then at least she’s got someone. That’s good.  
  
He never could picture her anywhere other than where he’d seen her. The field hockey field, the school parking lot. The greenhouse. After she left that night, she must have felt so alone. And maybe he could have reached out when he knew she was alive. He’d thought about it — thought about asking after her at the school or with her parents. But then he thought… what if they associated some of this with him. Her disappearance. He worried that it would get him into trouble, again. The cops made him feel like he was on thin ice for years — that he could barely do so much as look at a girl who might be younger than him without the town’s eyes on him.  
  
_Cherry hound._  
  
It wasn’t true but everyone thought that it was, so it was practically the same thing.  
  
The only other thing stopping him, the one that was heavy and dark, weighing him down like a stone, was the fear that Brigitte wouldn’t even bother with him, now that she didn’t need his help. And he just kinda didn’t want to know if that was true.  
  
So, now… what’s happening now? She seems to be making as much of an effort as he is to keep this accidental meeting from ending — to keep it sustained — but he’s afraid that it’s eventually going to be stretched too thin and snap apart again. He only hopes it’s not as fucked up as it was last time.

**BRIGITTE**

She comes downstairs just before the end of her shift to find Sam talking to Beth-Ann and her boots squeak sharply on the tiled floor as she stops fast and tries to decide if she should walk in on this or run and hide so it doesn’t seem like she’s interrupting. They both turn to her at the sound, though, so there’s that opportunity gone. Sam smiles at her and Brigitte wraps her arms around herself and crosses the distance, leaning against the edge of Beth-Ann’s desk so she’s equidistant from both of them. “Hey,” she says.  
  
“I said he could stay while we locked up,” Beth-Ann says to her softly and as she gets up to get her purse she catches Brigitte’s eyes to make sure it is. Brigitte nods. Beth-Ann’s come home with Brigitte more than once a couple years ago when some creepy guy she went on a date with once kept hanging around outside the museum when she was done work. Since then, they’ve had this unspoken agreement where they both look out for one another, even though they don’t actually really get along or have much to talk about.  
  
She pulls her coat on and Sam hands her back her scarf. She can feel Beth-Ann’s eyes on them and her cheeks get hot as she takes it back and winds it around her neck. “Thanks,” Brigitte says without looking at him.  
  
She lets Ghost handle most of the talking that evening. Brigitte has never been good at that, but she remembers that she could, once, with Sam. But now everything seems so big, and there’s all these new rules for adult conversation she’s learned to follow, even though she never meant to learn them.  
  
It’s Friday night, a godsend for Brigitte. It means two fulls days largely without people, save Ghost, of course. It’s a little strange with Sam here, too, and they don’t talk about what he’s going to do tomorrow or Sunday and even Brigitte doesn’t know if she wants him to stay or not. Or if he’ll want to.  
  
She’s saved his number in her phone, but there’s nothing sent between them save the text he sent to her so she would have his number. It just says his name, that’s it. Like he thinks maybe she has lots of unassigned numbers in her phone, so he wants to make sure she can find his. It does feel a little safer, just to have that, but she knows from Beth-Ann’s stories that guys don’t respond to texts or phone calls once they’ve gotten sick of you. But she thinks maybe Sam’s not like that. He was always around when she needed him, before. But maybe things have changed in him. _Anyway,_ she tells herself, _it doesn’t really matter, ‘cause I don’t need anybody anymore._  
  
She makes Sam take her room again, because Ghost has weekdays off here and there, but she still works weekend mornings so she’ll be getting up early. She ignores his protests and gets some of her things from the trunk in her room, including her camera and drops them all on the couch. The spare blanket is still there from last night.  
  
After Sam goes to bed and the lights go off in her room, Brigitte tells Ghost she’s going to shower and brings her clothes into the bathroom with her, because even wearing the t-shirt dress yesterday morning in front of Sam felt like a lot. Like she was too visible. It never felt like that with Ghost, somehow. She doesn’t know why.  
  
She dresses for bed in the bathroom rakes a comb through her wet hair, tearing through the tangled ends then heads back out to the couch. She jumps a little when Ghost pushes her bedroom door open, pale as a real ghost as she peeks out. Brigitte stops in the hallway in the darkness. They just look at one another for a moment as Brigitte struggles with what she wants to do. She’s going to be up for a while anyway. There’s something she wants to read, and she has to let her hair dry some anyway or it will be impossible tomorrow, but she doesn’t know if she wants to do it around someone else. The week has been long, it’s been a lot, and she’s tired of people. Ghost just slips out of sight, leaving Brigitte standing alone in the darkness. A light flickers from the bedside lamp and the door stands open for her, if she wants to.  
  
Brigitte goes back to the couch and takes a deep breath before she picks up the book she was reading, then returns to the hallway and slips inside Ghost’s room, pulling the door shut behind her. It scrapes hard against the floor in both directions, leaving a smooth rounded triangle of wood in the hallway floorboards. Ghost smiles at her, tucking herself up against the headboard and Brigitte joins her there, opening her book against her knees. Ghost sketches something for a while at her side, but then the pencil comes off the page too long and Brigitte braces herself.  
  
“How long is he going to stay here?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Brigitte says. “Why?”  
  
“It interrupts the routine,” Ghost says. “That’s bad for my mental wellbeing you know.”  
  
Brigitte rolls her eyes. “That’s not what they told you.”  
  
“Well, not exactly,” Ghost says. “I’m just looking at it as though—”  
  
“Life’s going to throw stuff at you. You won’t be able to handle worse things if you can’t handle a break in routine. Do you want him to go?” It’s a genuine question. She’s said her piece, now she’s genuinely asking.  
  
Ghost is quiet, staring down at her drawing before she flips the book shut and sets it aside, twisting to face Brigitte on the mattress, legs criss-crossed. “You like him, don’t you? You don’t like most guys.”  
  
“I like him as a person. From what I remember.” Brigitte keeps her eyes on the words, but she isn’t actually reading them anymore.  
  
“Tell me about what it was like back then.”  
  
Brigitte shuts her eyes, rubbing her fingers over her forehead. She hates talking about ‘back then’ to Ghost because it’s hard not to trip over what really happened; what she doesn’t want Ghost to know. “He owned this gardening business. He worked at the school a lot so I saw him there. We talked about science sometimes. If my sister and I weren’t talking, I’d talk to him.” Because she had been so lonely. It was just a few weeks but Ginger had always been there, always at her side, and then she wasn’t and Brigitte had felt untethered.  
  
She'd had no idea.  
  
“So what happened?” Ghost asks, shaking her out of her thoughts. “Why haven’t you mentioned him?”  
  
Brigitte sort of shakes her head. “I left right after that. We didn’t know each other very long, I left too quickly. We didn’t have any way to keep in touch.”  
  
Ghost’s thin fingers find their way through Brigitte’s wet hair and run down her neck. She shifts onto her knees and combs her fingers through it, separating it into parts, and Brigitte lets her. Maybe Ginger would have made fun of her for this, once upon a time: girls braiding each other’s hair — or whatever Ghost is doing, tugging and pulling at strands — but Brigitte likes to be touched by people she trusts. Those people are very few and far between. Sometimes she feels like she’s starving, but the kind where she doesn’t even notice she’s hungry until someone reaches out.

**SAM**

He still dreams about Halloween night. Right after it happened, there were a lot, at first, and then less and less as time went on, but seeing Brigitte again, it must have triggered something. He dreams that when she turns to him for the first time in the museum that she turns around covered in blood. He dreams she attacks him with terrifying strength. He dreams they are in her pantry closet again, and that things go differently. He dreams she almost dies instead. He dreams she does die. He dreams she turns into one of those things right there in the pantry with him, and he can’t get the door to open and her body cracks and grows and blocks out all the light…  
  
They jolt him like a falling dream and he shakes awake, but doesn’t yell. He sits up though, in bed, and doesn’t know where he is, but then his eyes adjust to the grey winter light pouring in through the window behind the bed, and he remembers.  
  
_What_ he wonders _the fuck are you doing here?_ He meant to come to Toronto, make some cash selling weed, and then try to make a life here. He knows it’s an expensive city, he doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t even like the city that much, but it seemed like his best bet. He’s got all these stupid, romantic notions of remaking himself. You can’t do that in Saskatchewan, and he doesn’t know enough French for Montreal. He'd never be able to afford British Columbia in a million years, and there’s no fucking way he’s going to be able to work in a government town like Ottawa. So here he is, not even forty-five minutes away from Bailey fucking Downs, but it feels far. Toronto and the suburbs of Toronto are very different.  
  
Yesterday when he was out he’d stopped to light a cigarette and his eyes had fallen on a used syringe tucked against the rise of the sidewalk. He has a feeling it wasn’t monkshood in there and it had rolled over him like a wave in that moment: that he _hates_ the city. He already misses green things. Ever since selling the greenhouse he’s been trying to convince himself he didn’t make a mistake, but he’s not good at anything else except dealing drugs, and he’s so goddamn sick of that life.  
  
_You fucked up, idiot_, he thinks. His heartbeat is still going haywire. He needs a joint or something, although sometimes that makes it worse. There’s a sound from outside and Sam practically jumps out of his skin, but then he realizes that that’s just kitchen sounds — it’s not a lycanthrope. He checks his phone, and it’s after six. Maybe it’s Ghost out there, or maybe Brigitte, but either way he needs shake the dregs of that nightmare off. It’s cold out of the bed and he shivers as he uses the light from his phone to find his pot and then the door without injuring himself this time. His mind’s still running — _you’re a fuckup, this isn’t going to work, working for someone else is going to suck after working for yourself for so long, what the _fuck_ are you doing here?_  
  
Brigitte is pulling a cup down from a cabinet and looks back over her shoulder to him from the kitchen as he pushes the door open. His thoughts go quiet. They don’t say anything, but he crosses quietly to the divide between rooms and leans his elbows on it. She sets the cup on the table and then reaches for another one and it’s a question — she creates it out of nothing but the gesture, and Sam reads it in the silence. She has to stand on her toes to reach the cabinet. Her hair’s pulled back into two french-braids that look messy and slept-on, barely contained. She looks smaller without her hair everywhere. It occurs to him he’s never actually seen her face with her hair pulled back. It’s strange.  
  
“Okay,” he says, in answer to her question, and she pulls down a mug for him, closes the cabinet door. He holds out the joint. “Do you mind if I smoke this in here, or should I go out?”  
  
“You can here.” she says.  
  
He moves towards the window but she shakes her head. “It’s too cold in here already, it’s fine.” She finds him something to use as an ashtray.  
  
“Ghost go to work?” he asks her.  
  
She nods, half turning way to deal with the coffee in the machine. He smokes quietly, and feel the tension in his stomach start to fade. When she sits with him she sits with her legs criss-cross in the chair, fingers wrapped around her cup.  
  
“Yeah, I think I’m gonna… take my chances and try to find an apartment.”  
  
She looks up at him, and there’s something he can’t quite read, but it feels like he said the wrong thing.  
  
She’s thinking, he thinks, so he finishes half the joint, then puts it out, pulls the coffee towards him instead and leaves her to it. Finally she says “I know it’s weird, probably, being here with us. But you shouldn’t have to go just because you feel… it’s not an…” She’s really struggling. Sam looks for the rights words, the right thing to say to help her, but then she figures it out on her own. “Toronto’s expensive, and— it’s not always easy to find work, especially full time. If you need to stay here, I don’t mind.”  
  
“And Ghost?”  
  
“Ghost likes things to go her way, she’ll be okay. I’m not saying forever, I’m saying just until you figure things out.”  
  
“It feels like a lot. If I stay, I’m not taking your room again.”  
  
Brigitte looks at him, then her eyes flicker to her doorway. She looks like she misses it, that solitude. She nods, breathes out this, “okay,” then pulls one knee to her chest and balances her cup on it. “I can go out with you today, if you want, if you’re going to keep looking for work. I have some things to do anyway.”  
  
“You don’t want to take advantage of this alone time?” He gets the feeling that she maybe doesn’t get enough of it. But she surprises him when she says “No, I want to talk to you.”

**BRIGITTE**

Her heart’s beating hard, because that means some things. It means opening herself up to someone again, it means getting into all of that stuff.  
  
“Okay,” Sam says, “Yeah, me too. I mean, unless you think it’d be better if we don’t.”  
  
Brigitte shakes her head. “I don’t know…” she searches his face for something and Sam goes still, watching her. He looks a little freaked, like he thinks she’s going to tell him she’s changing again, into something totally else… she wondered if he’d stay if it happened again. She wonders if he’ll stay after he hears this.  
  
“I lied to you, earlier,” she says. She puts her coffee cup down on the table, pulls her hands back so she’s holding her leg close to her chest, folding into herself. “In Edmonton, I never stayed at a hostel… I, um…” She looks up at him, pressing her nail beds against her lower lip. Sam doesn’t look away, but he’s not moving, like he’s steeling himself. She forces herself to drop her hand. “I, um… I was pretty messed up, or something. I kept…” her mind had broken. That’s what happened. “Seeing things… people that weren’t there.”  
  
Sam seems to shift without actually moving. She looks up just enough to see that he’s still looking at her, and then she drops her eyes to her hands, picking at her cuticles. “I saw my sister everywhere, I… followed her in crowds to places I didn’t know and got lost and she was never there. I heard her voice… every time I tried to sleep I’d hear her talking to me. Saying my name.”  
  
Bee…  
  
She takes a breath and it shakes and she shuts her eyes until she’s steady again. She exhales. “I mean I knew she was dead. I knew that, but I wanted her not to be so much that I let myself believe it. I… stopped sleeping in case I missed her, in case she said something important. In case I saw her and it was the last time and… I don’t know. Someone called the clinic, the motel manager maybe. I don’t know, I just… they brought me there. They did all these tests for drugs and… couldn’t figure out the monkshood in my system. They thought I had some kind of psychosis and then, when they realized it wasn’t that, maybe borderline…” She rolls her eyes a little. “But I… I knew why they were keeping me there. I knew that if what happened to us, to Ginger and me, if that was normal that they might have been able to help. I had PTSD, I needed… a trauma specialist, but I couldn’t tell them because…”  
  
“They’d think you were crazy.”  
  
Brigitte shrugs. “It was fucked up. I knew that I had access to the help I needed, but I couldn’t actually get it. Not unless they were going to believe in werewolves. So… I knew I had to get stronger, and… I didn’t let myself look for Ginger anymore. I… I let her go. It took a little over a year, but after I was sixteen, and all the medical tests came back clear, they let me out. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me. They knew my situation at home wasn’t good. P— my mom was still in prison…” she looks up.  
  
_For Trina_. It ignites between them like a flame. Sam doesn’t say anything, though. He lets her finish.  
  
“And my dad left, so I got help from the government for kids like me and I got an apartment in a halfway house on the condition that I finished high school and… that’s where I met Ghost. She’d been at the same clinic a couple years after me. They placed her as my roommate in the halfway house when I was eighteen and she was sixteen. She was… like me in a lot of ways. I dunno, I couldn’t leave her. So… we waited until she turned eighteen, and then I started applying to schools. When I left Edmonton for university here in Toronto, she came with me.  
  
“Where were her parents?”  
  
“They’re dead. Her grandmother was looking after her.”  
  
“Did she die, too?”  
  
Brigitte presses her lips together. “That’s another story.”

**SAM**

“My mother didn’t kill Trina.” Brigitte says, then. Sam takes a breath and looks away, nodding.  
  
“Did Ginger do it?”  
  
Brigitte hesitates too long. “No… it wasn’t that simple. Trina came to our house. She was— upset, she was looking for that dog she had and Ginger… pulled her inside, but she didn’t kill her. Trina… Ginger was messing with her. She was out of control by then, but Trina slipped. She hit her head on the edge of the counter. We, um… couldn’t call the police, it was too—… she’d already killed the neighbour’s dog. She’d infected Jason McCardy and… after you left, that day I blew you off at field hockey, Trina…” she exhales again, like she’s wrenching this stuff out of her. She pushed me down. Ginger lost it on her. She beat her up. If we’d called someone, she would have been a suspect and she couldn’t… she was too far gone. We had to cover it up, so… so Ginger and me buried Trina in the backyard.”  
  
“Jesus Christ,” Sam says, softly.  
  
“I’m sorry. I thought we’d fix it somehow, but we couldn’t call the cops. If they took her to prison, if they took her in and saw her, how she was…”  
  
“Yeah, no, but why didn’t you tell _me?_” Sam asks. “I fucking… straight up asked you, Brigitte. Where you were that night.”  
  
“I needed you to help me. I thought you wouldn’t if you knew.”  
  
Sam thinks back. Brigitte and the monkshood and asking if he was a cherry hound. Giving him an alibi because she knew it wasn’t him. She didn’t need to trust him and his innocence in Trina’s death, she knew. It was him putting himself way out there for her, only half-guessing at everything.  
  
“I needed to know how to make the cure.”  
  
Sam meets her eyes and she holds his gaze. She’s not making excuses for herself, just telling him the facts and Sam wonders if he would have done it… helped her even if he knew.  
  
“I wonder what kind of guy that would make me if I helped you even if I knew what’d happened. But, Brigitte… yeah, you know, I think I did know. I just didn’t want to believe it.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because I wanted to help you.”  
  
“Why?” she asks, voice slipping into that harder, lower register. Protective.  
  
“Because, fuck, I dunno—”  
  
“I lied to you.”  
  
“You must’ve felt like you had to.”  
  
Brigitte blinks then looks away, running her palms over her cheeks and smoothing her hair where it’s frizzing out of the braids. “I was trying to protect her… just… and you show up again and I lied to you again about working in Edmonton—”  
  
“Yeah, you don’t… have to— you don’t… that’s your personal— No, don’t, I get it. I get that, Brigitte, don’t fucking beat yourself up over it. You didn’t have to tell me that.”  
  
“I wanted to,” she says, pushing it out in a rush. “I want to… I want us to be okay. Like—” Brigitte fights something back, they’re at the edge of something, but ultimately she can’t say it. Instead she says “I feel like maybe we could fix it. Or try again, or…”  
  
Sam nods. And fuck, it means the world that she wants to. Because maybe she thinks he’s more than worthless. She might have needed him for something, but she never came to him for the reasons that the others did. And, fuck, he'll take it. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, let’s do that.”  
  
“Sorry,” Brigitte says, but there’s so much in that word. So many things to be sorry for, maybe things that can’t be fixed with an apology, but it’s there, and Sam knows that things aren’t perfect or easy, and sometimes you just have to take what the other person’s capable of giving.  
  
“Hey,” he says, “Would you have come? If things worked out differently, and you cured her, would you’ve come back to the greenhouse?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Brigitte says, soft. “I think so… but maybe I’d’ve been scared that things would be different.”  
  
“Different how?”  
  
She looks at him. “Why did you help me? In the beginning, before you cared.” She twitches a little, this strange jolt of her shoulder, tension written all over her.  
  
“I was curious,” Sam says. “At first. And then, I dunno… and then I really… you were my friend. Somewhere in there, that happened. I wanted you to be okay.”

**BRIGITTE**

_I want you to be okay._  
  
She remembers saying that to Ginger. How true it was, but how she’d meant something else — _I want you to be normal again. I want to go back to how things were._  
  
“Why did you want me to be okay?”  
  
“Because,” Sam answers. “Because I cared. You made me care.”  
  
She swallows. “D’you still care?”  
  
“Do you?”  
  
Brigitte holds his eyes, and then she nods, but she can’t hold his gaze after that.  
  
“Good,” Sam says. “ ‘Cause I do, too.”

**SAM**

Brigitte unbraids her hair before they go out, wearing it down around her face again. Most of it ends up tucked under her scarf and they go out into the cold for her photographs which she does with an old film camera. He doesn’t ask her what she plans to do with them, the photos — he remembers everyone always fucking asking him what he was going to do with himself and he hated it. He doesn’t want to have that stupid, fucking generic conversation with Brigitte. Instead he asks her if there’s a theme to all this, because it seems to be everything — buildings, leafless trees, cracks in the sidewalk, chainlink fences. “Broken things,” she says.  
  
They cover quite a distance, mostly on foot, breaking in the middle for coffee and to get the blood flowing into their fingers and toes again somewhere with central heating.  
  
The sun’s starting to set, so it must be around four or five in the afternoon when they head back. She stops him when they’re at a set of streetlights, just as the walk signal goes. She almost has to hold him back because he’s started walking. She doesn’t say anything, just sort of maneuvers him back against a wall beneath a cut-off fire-escape. It’s the most she’s ever touched him, he thinks, her hands in makeshift fingerless gloves like a Dickensian orphan against his upper arms through his jacket which most definitely isn’t warm enough. “Wait,” she says. Of course, he does. The sun is in his eyes and she steps back and tilts her head with narrowed eyes, sort of looks at him like he’s a crack in the sidewalk and not a person, and then she raises her camera. She doesn’t ask.  
  
Sam doesn’t know what to do so he doesn’t do anything, just sort of squints against the sunlight cutting through two buildings like a forest fire. “Does this mean I’m broken things?” he asks her.  
  
Brigitte lowers her camera. “I think that’s up to you.”  
  
The next time the walk signal changes, they cross the street, and they don’t say anything else about it.  
  
Ghost is already home when they get back and she introduces him to the possibilities for gluten free noodles in the kitchen. “The corn ones aren’t as good because they get all mushy,” she says. “Brown and white rice is best. Whatever you do stay away from the ones they make from beans,” she tells him, pointing an uncooked piece of rice spaghetti at him.  
  
“They’re truly awful.” This, from Brigitte, across from him, who is looking at something on a battered laptop that looks like it weighs about fifteen pounds.  
  
“Barbara used to make me eat gluten because she was all ‘You’ll eat what’s put in front of you,’ so I pretty much just felt super sick all the time”.  
  
“Barbara’s your grandmother?” Sam asks.  
  
“Yup,” Ghost says, cheerfully. Like this isn’t some barely-latent form of child abuse. “She was very old-fashioned.”  
  
Sam pulls a face. “That’s fucked up.”  
  
“Hm, well. Barbara’s fucked up, now, so I suppose what goes around comes around.”  
  
Brigitte stops typing and a strange silence falls. Sam feels the need to reach for a cigarette, adjust his collar, anything, but he doesn’t move. Ghost carefully adds noodles to the pot of boiling water. “She has brain damage now,” she says. “From carbon monoxide poisoning.”  
  
“Okay, Ghost,” Brigitte says, but this thing’s rolling now, and Ghost ignores her.  
  
Ghost hops up to sit on the counter. “When I was a kid they diagnosed me with ADD but they were wrong. Actually, a lot of cases like mine go undiagnosed for years, especially in women. People usually think that we’re bipolar or have some kind of learning disability. I set Barbara on fire when I was fourteen. I thought that she was trying to poison me like that little girl in The Sixth Sense, with the stuff she’d bought for the rats, because I felt sick all the time from eating stuff with gluten. That’s why I was at the clinic.”  
  
Sam waits for her to tell him she’s shitting him. She doesn’t. Ghost stirs the pasta in the pot like she’s just told him that she’s a vegetarian or something. “I have Schizotypal Personality Disorder. They told me that things wouldn’t have gotten so bad if I was properly cared for, but Barbara mostly ignored me.”  
  
Sam looks at her, dressed in all these bright colours, her hair so pale it’s like a halo around her head, frizzing slightly from the dry winter air.  
  
“So why’re you telling me this?”  
  
“Because Brigitte likes you. You seem like you could be a friend and everyone asks me sooner or later what’s wrong with me, so I thought I’d get it out of the way.” Ghost raises her eyebrows, lips pressed together as she looks up. That seems to be the first time she reads the vibe of the room, and she bites her lip. She looks between him and Brigitte, anxious for the first time. “Should I not have?”  
  
Sam looks at Brigitte who’s watching him over the laptop screen. He can’t read her, but he can tell she’s waiting to read him.  
  
“Somehow,” Sam says “I’ve been told weirder things…”  
  
“I’m not dangerous or anything,” Ghost says. “I know how to handle false perceptions I might have now that I go to therapy and my situation is more stable. I’m much less paranoid.” She nods. “I can even go into my larger classes now without too much anxiety. The first two years of university were like… super hard, so…” she trails off and looks down into the pasta pot, poking at it with a fork. “Oh, shit, it’s already sticking together.”  
  
After supper, Ghost goes to bed first because she works Sunday morning as well, and Sam talks Brigitte into letting him take the couch and she reluctantly agrees.  
  
“Did she freak you out?” Brigitte asks, lingering even though they’ve shut the TV off.  
  
“She doesn’t freak me out. It’s the whole… burning her grandma thing.”  
  
“She got out of an abusive situation the only way she knew how,” Brigitte says, worrying at a thread on her sleeve, winding it around her finger before she can tear it off. She lets it fall to the floor. “Perfectly sane people have done worse.”  
  
Sam can’t argue with that.  
  
“She needed someone who actually gave a shit about her. I saw myself in her, when we first met. And I guess I remembered how much I needed someone to give a shit about me.”  
  
Sam’s quiet. He wants to tell her that he did give a shit back then, too but he hopes that was obvious. Anyway, Brigitte thought he was dead, so it’s not like she knew she had that support. She must have felt alone for a long time, until Ghost.  
  
Brigitte takes a breath and gets up. “ ‘Night, Sam.”  
  
He watches her go. Before she shuts her door, she hesitates, like she has something else to say, but it doesn’t come.  
  
“ ‘Night, Brigitte,” Sam says, and watches as she shuts the door softly between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like Ghost, I also have a mental illness.
> 
> Writing Ghost as having Schizotypal Personality Disorder was a decision I made based on my own research and observations about her character. It is not meant to be a diagnostic tool, a commentary on Schizotypal Personality Disorder itself, or an insinuation that people who are mentally ill or have personality disorders are all violent or have violent tendencies. 
> 
> I debated on commenting on her diagnosis at all, but I don't agree with the exhaustive prevalence and misdiagnosis of "sociopath" in so much contemporary pop culture — which is what Ghost is said to be in much of the commentary and literature on the film — which was why I avoided that particular diagnosis. I wanted to emphasize that her situation with Barbara was abusive (as I believe it was), and that that was the main factor in Ghost's ultimate (misguided but, to Ghost, desperate) decision to... well... set her on fire.
> 
> Ghost _is_ mentally ill, and she has performed violent actions in her past; that is a part of her character in this film. I have made an effort to avoid negative stereotyping of those who have a mental illness while at the same time attempting to stay true to Ghost's character.
> 
> As a more fun part of this author's note: the thyme blossom cast in resin on Brigitte's keychain? In my mind, Ghost gave her that at some point. It's a little nod to that moment in the film where Brigitte asks Ghost to give her superhero persona "time"
> 
> Ghost found a way to do it in this story, even if it was a little roundabout.


	3. Chapter 3

**BRIGITTE**

It’s after he finds work in Toronto that she realizes that she kind of didn’t want him to. Or, at least, not yet. She still hasn’t figured out how to have him back in her life, and suddenly there’s this other thing — like, now he’s working, he’s going to get an apartment, and if he lives somewhere else, will they actually see each other? She almost still can’t wrap her head around the fact that he’s here, alive, breathing beside her — his breath misting in the cold just the same as hers does.  
  
“So what is it?” she asks as he walks with her from her work to the bus stop that will take them home. ‘Home’, who does she think she is? To her home, Ghost’s home. Not his.  
  
“It’s… research assistance.” Off her look he breathes this laugh, cigarette smoke mingling with his breath. It’s just barely still daylight, but the tops of the buildings catch this wild orange while they’re down on the street far below, all mixed up in shadows. Brigitte closes her fingers into a fist in her pocket, tight for a second, then relaxes, until she grounds herself again as separate from him; as an appropriate distance away. Sometimes she finds herself drifting closer to him as they walk, the sleeve of her coat brushing his. She always corrects it. She likes the way he smiles when he finds something funny, like now, which is different from the way he smiles when he feels uncertain, and different, too, from the way he smiles when he’s annoyed. Sam smiles so much, she remembers that, how disconcerting she found it, as a teenager. How much she liked that, when he let his guard down enough, she could see that his teeth weren’t straight. That they sort of clashed with everything else in his face. It was easier for her to look at him when he was smiling, because that imperfection was something she could understand, something she connected with easier than… than how beautiful she’d thought he was.  
  
She was barely fifteen, she was stupid, and he seemed different, just like Pamela said that some guys would.  
  
But then he _was_ different. She knew that, but by the time she was certain, it was too late. Or that’s what she thought. But it’s been years since then, and maybe he’s changed. She has.  
  
“What?” Sam asks her. “You can’t picture me hunched over a computer in an office checking facts? You don’t think I can do it?”  
  
“I know you can do it,” Brigitte says, “you read more than me. I’m just surprised you’d want to.”  
  
“It’s mostly specimen research. Identifying species in the field, and things people bring in. Diseases, soil types, pollination, cultivation… a lot of it’s outside.”  
  
She twists her mouth. “That really what you wanted?”  
  
“I like that it’s not Bailey Downs. I like that it’s plants and not fucking… bussing tables or something. It’s probably the best I could find in a city, I mean… It’s good enough, for now.”  
  
“Is this what adult life is?” Brigitte asks. “Just settling for what’s ‘good enough’?”  
  
“Is that what _you’re_ doing?” Sam asks her as they reach the bus stop and stop walking. He asks her softly and she keeps her head down even as he turns to face her. She stares at their boots and really thinks about it.

“I don’t know,” she finally says, and then she meets his eyes. Somehow he’s closer than she expected. She doesn’t step back. “Sometimes I think I’m just surviving all day long. Like when I finally go to sleep I think… ‘maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and everything will be right again.’ And then it’s not but I get up anyway. Because… because Ghost needs me…”  
  
Sam’s looking at her, hard, and there’s something in his eyes she can’t take. She looks away, stealing his cigarette from his fingers, and that look dissipates. She holds the cigarette away from him, near her mouth, but doesn’t take a drag.  
  
“That can’t be the only thing.”  
  
“It’s not,” she says, almost but not quite defensive. “I still have pictures I want to take. Ideas for projects. It’s just… every day I’m further away from my sister. Like… every day I know who I am less.”  
  
“No one knows who the fuck they are at twenty-three, Brigitte.”  
  
She takes a drag. Sam looks over her shoulder and nods. “Bus is coming.”  
  
She offers it back to him but he shakes his head. “Finish it,” he says, so she does, then butts it out in the snow before she tosses it into the trash. She doesn’t like leaving them on the ground. On the bus, Sam half-blocks her from the jostle and press of people she doesn’t know. He does it like it’s by mistake, but she knows it’s not. She notices, but she doesn’t say anything, and neither does he.

**SAM**

When they get back to her apartment there’s someone else there, this guy that Sam doesn’t know. He’s tall, somewhat slope-shouldered, dark-haired. Brigitte doesn’t really pause though, she just goes about her normal routine of shedding her winter gear and so Sam follows suit.  
  
“Hi,” the guy says. “I’m Marcus.”  
  
“Hey. Yeah, Sam,” Sam says, trying to get a gauge on this guy based on Brigitte’s reaction but she’s not giving away much.  
  
“Sam’s Brigitte’s friend,” Ghost tells Marcus as she pokes her head out of the bathroom, combing her pale hair out around her face. If this is a surprise to Marcus, he doesn’t act like it. “We’re going out tonight,” Ghost tells Brigitte, but she probably didn’t need to say anything. She emerges dressed for a date — it’s combination of a dress and tights that makes her look very bird-of-paradise. Lots of colours. Standing next to Brigitte, they’re night and day. “You guys can come if you want to.”  
  
“Uh,” Brigitte says, and casts the smallest glance in his direction. Sam knows that would be weird, and Brigitte seems to think so, too because she pulls a face and says no, and Sam can’t tell if it’s more strange that Ghost would ask, or that Ghost is seeing some guy, because he thought…  
  
“When are you coming home?” Brigitte asks, and Sam catches the way Marcus cuts his eyes at him like he wants to commiserate, but pretends he doesn’t because this is drifting pretty rapidly into the territory of the very weird.  
  
“I dunno,” Ghost says, brightly and then she and Marcus trade places with Brigitte and Sam in the hallway so that they can put on their winter things. Brigitte stands small and slightly hunched, backlit by the bright living room at the mouth of the hall and Sam keeps his eyes on her.  
  
“Text me,” Brigitte tells her.  
  
“Okay.” Ghost says, pulling on her boots and standing up with a sweep of blonde hair over her shoulder. Bye!”  
  
Marcus echoes her goodbye and then they’re gone, and Sam and Brigitte are left alone in a suddenly very quiet apartment.  
  
“Could you lock that?” Brigitte asks, turning to go into the kitchen. Sam does as he’s told, then follows her in where she’s already started to make tea. She seems tense, her movements less careful than usual. She drops a spoon that clatters into the sink, jarring in the quiet that’s spreading thickly between them.  
  
Sam breaks it. “So what’s all that?”  
  
“Nothing,” Brigitte says.  
  
“Is Marcus like… weird or something?”  
  
“He's fine. She just didn’t tell me they were going out, that’s all. I was just surprised.” That defensiveness is back. In her voice, in her posture. Sam thinks he’s starting to cotton on.  
  
“Does it bother you?” he asks. “That she goes out with him?”  
  
“Why should it?” Brigitte asks, her voice very careful.  
  
“Because… I dunno, I thought you guys had an arrangement.” That’s what she called it, right?  
  
Brigitte rounds on him with narrowed eyes, her back against the counter, arms around herself. She’s practically swimming in dark clothes, her hair like a storm-cloud. It all kind of speaks of impending wreckage — his — but he doesn’t look away.  
  
“That’s what you said, isn’t it?” he asks. “You and Ghost?”  
  
“Why do you care so much?”  
  
“Why does it put you so on edge?”  
  
Brigitte scowls at him, then sighs. He catches the quickest flash of an eye roll before she looks away. “It doesn’t, it’s just… I know her, Marcus doesn’t. If something goes wrong... what if he doesn’t know what to do?”  
  
“You can’t protect her all the time, Brigitte.”  
  
“This isn’t really any of your business, though, is it?” she asks.  
  
“I’m just trying to get a handle on it.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because it makes you unhappy.”  
  
“Well I’m not fucking _happy_ lots of the time, Sam.”  
  
She’s got him there. Because he isn’t, either. He just wishes it were different, for her. He breathes a humourless laugh through his nose and thinks that he doesn't like she way she just said his name, and can't remember if she's ever said it before. He waits, maybe too long, before he asks. “Don’t you want to be? Happy?”  
  
“Do you?” she asks him, but apparently it’s a rhetorical question, because she continues. “I think that there’s this… idea. That happiness is like the ultimate goal. Like your life isn’t worth living unless you’re happy all the time. But why happiness? Like why is that the emotion that we all strive for and then— feel like failures when we don’t achieve it? Like our lives must be missing something because we’re not radiantly fucking happy all the time.” The kettle screams and she takes it off the burner, switching the stove off. “Most of the time I’m… content.” She says it like she doesn’t know if that’s the right word. “I like this apartment. I like not freezing in the winter time. I like… that working at the museum means I mostly get to work alone, and that if someone weird comes in or my boss is on the warpath, Beth-Ann is there to back me up. I like Ghost… I like that she does art and doesn’t worry about whether or not drawing comics is going to get her a job when she’s finished school. Like that she just _does_ it because she wants to and not because anyone told her she should. I never would have bought a camera again if it wasn’t for Ghost.” She swallows. “I killed my sister. She was my whole world, and I didn’t think I could live without her — sometimes I still don’t think I can do it, but then I do. So, maybe I don’t deserve happiness, I don’t know. Most of the time just being content is good enough. No one can maintain happiness forever. What would even be the fucking point, then? Maintaining that peak, just this one emotion out of a thousand? People wouldn’t even notice happiness anymore. They’d make it mediocre.” She takes a breath and turns away. “Do you want tea or coffee?”

**BRIGITTE**

“You know you didn’t have a choice.” That’s what Sam says after this long, long pause. He says it like he was in the room with them at the end, like he’d even know. Like he even understands a fraction of what she and Ginger had had.  
  
“Yes I did,” Brigitte says. “I could have died there, but I didn’t want to. I chose to live instead.” She turns to him and holds out the box of teabags, trying to change the subject. “There’s only one left, so…”  
  
“I’m glad you did. Choose to live.”  
  
Brigitte meets his eyes and there’s this feeling like someone’s unstopped something inside her. All this… overwhelming feeling hits her at once. She has no idea what the fuck to do with it all, or even how to categorize it, just that suddenly she wants to cry. She looks back at the box of tea in her hands and says, very softly, “You can have it,” because it’s the last one, and she wanted tea, but Sam almost fucking died for her. For _years_ she thought he had, and _now_ he’s here saying he’s glad _she’s_ made it this far. She turns back to the counter quickly, away from him, and drops the bag into one of the cups, the one he’s been using most of his time here and fills it with hot water and the whole gesture feels so fucking small and pathetic, because she remembers how he sounded when the wolf attacked him, the terror in it, so much greater than her own. He was willing to do that for her and she left him there in that basement covered in blood and now, after all this time, all she fucking has to offer him is fucking Red Rose and the couch in her living room.  
  
She hears him push his chair back. He touches her arm, just above the elbow and it is whisper soft, just as she turns and she says, very fast and without even really meaning to “Don’t fucking touch me.”  
  
He backs up immediately. She puts the cup of tea down on the table in front of the chair he’s just vacated and that gives her the second she needs to pull herself together. “Sorry,” she says.  
  
“I didn’t mean to— fuck, I… didn’t mean to make you feel—”  
  
“You didn’t, it’s okay. I just… you always pulled through for me back then, you always had a plan. You believed me when no one else did or even would have. And on Halloween, I— there’s just so many things I wish I’d done differently, so many ways I could have saved her, or _you_. I used to think about it all the time, but I had to stop, it was too much. And I just feel like this is it, this is all I have to offer you. And it kind of sucks.”  
  
“I mean…” Sam says, pushing his hands into his pockets, avoiding her eyes and looking deeply uncomfortable. “I like tea…”  
  
It’s so earnest and so fucking stupid all at once that she’s startled into a laugh. Barely. It comes out of her almost like a cough, sticking in her diaphragm, in her throat. It comes out as this soft, sharp huff, almost like a scoff. She almost smiles only it's like whiplash from the desperation she felt a second ago. “You know what I mean,” she says, but it’s easier now, to speak. Her chest feels less tight.  
  
“You don’t owe me,” Sam says. “It was my choice.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I dunno. Because I liked you.” Brigitte turns away, finding the drip filter and the coffee because she can’t quote cope with that, and all or any of its possible meanings. “Because all that fucking stuff, lycanthropes, homeopathic remedies… it was interesting. And you always showing up out of nowhere…”  
  
“Always showing up with the problem.”  
  
“Didn’t matter. I felt like I had a purpose. Like maybe I wasn’t just... fucking useless. Not as long as you needed something I had.”  
  
“Then it could’ve been anyone,” Brigitte says.  
  
“No it couldn’t’ve. Had to be the girl who knew what a lycanthrope was.”  
  
She bites her lip, then asks “So are you saying we used each other?” She keeps her eyes on the water as it filters through the grounds.  
  
“I dunno,” Sam says. “It didn’t feel like that to me.”  
  
“Me neither.”

**SAM**

Sam thinks that that — all that, is more than he’s ever heard Brigitte speak at once. At the greenhouse, back in Bailey Downs, she, like him, had turned out to have a lot to say. More than either of them really knew how to verbalize to another person, because neither of them ever really seemed to have a space to do that. Sam remembers being hushed by his parents because the information he’d compiled even as a kid had been expansive and connected, somehow, even by the thinnest roots inside his head. When he was in school, he was ‘too smart’ in his groups of friends. In the classroom, he wasn’t smart enough. Ultimately, it was a system thing. School, work, money. It all fed into this scheme of greed and one-upmanship and capitalism that he found to be completely at odds with the way he understood life, and himself in the universe. He hadn’t even realized, until Brigitte turned up, that he _still_ had a lot to say, that it hadn't been crushed out of him. It made a difference when someone cared to listen, so he wanted to listen to her, too. He still does.  
  
When her coffee’s ready, they go into the living room to sit. They talk about other things, like a silent agreement. This time, she doesn’t wedge herself as far as she can into the opposite corner of the couch. It’s the strangest feeling, these conversations that don’t revolve around Halloween, 1999. It almost feels like he’s just met her for the first time because they’re still trying to figure out where they’re similar. What they still have in common, and where they're different.  
  
Ghost comes back late. Brigitte is just arguing that Sam is more of an anarchist than a socialist, that socialism is romantic, and Sam’s idealizing it, and Sam is trying to tell her that it has nothing to do with other people and everything to do with how the system functions and it’s almost hilarious because he likes that ferocity in her when they aren’t huddled in a pantry with their fucking mortal lives on the line. The floor in the outside hallway creaks, and the locks on the front door are undone. Ghost enters sans Marcus, but she’s weightless, a little buzzed Sam thinks, but all the keyed-up energy of a good date. And the atmosphere shifts, it becomes a little heavier — not bad, just intense, like the air is thick. Brigitte eventually says something about going to bed after that, and within a handful of minutes, the two bedroom doors on either side of the living room close and Sam finds himself alone.  
  
It’s not much later. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of lying on the couch in the darkness, listening to the occasional swish of a car passing through the grey slush on the street below, when Ghost’s door creaks open and she crosses the living room, barefoot and as spectre-like as her name, past the foot of the couch where Sam pretends to sleep and then from over the back of the sofa, he hears Brigitte’s door open and close and then Brigitte’s low voice, the words indiscernible.

**BRIGITTE**

Normally, she would expect Ghost to come into her room, because this is what they do. She just wasn’t sure that she would if Sam was here. Her skin is still cold from outside and Brigitte gasps as Ghost wraps cold arms around her and slides her feet between Brigitte’s calves, searching for warmth.  
  
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this—”  
  
“Why?” Ghost whispers. “Sam?” She finds the hem of Brigitte’s t-shirt and gets her hands up underneath it, fingers like ice where they press against the warmth of Brigitte’s stomach. Brigitte squeaks and Ghost presses her grin into Brigitte’s shoulder. “He’s asleep,” Ghost says, and then bites Brigitte’s ear just where the cartilage begins.  
  
This is how it goes. Ghost goes out with boys like Marcus — lately it’s been just Marcus. She’ll hold his hand and kiss him but she’ll never let things go too far, and then she’ll come home to Brigitte, to the safe place they’ve created between them, and Brigitte will…  
  
“He touched my leg tonight, when we were kissing,” Ghost says, right against Brigitte’s throat, already pushing herself against the sharpness of Brigitte’s hip bone, just that one, continuous pressure. Her fingers slide down Brigitte’s spine beneath her t-shirt. “Slowly, like he thought I wouldn’t notice. He pushed my dress all the way up to my hip,” Ghost says, and Brigitte skates her fingers fast up the inside of Ghost’s bare thigh. Ghost whispers, “I stopped him,” and Brigitte’s fingers slip into her underwear to find her already wet enough to just push her fingers inside and Ghost groans, arching, muffling the sound against Brigitte’s skin.  
  
Ghost might not let Marcus, but Brigitte can. This thing between them is safe. They’re protected here in a way that they are not, outside. In a way that they are not, with men.  
  
Brigitte doesn’t go on dates with guys. She doesn’t go on dates with girls, either, even though that seems slightly less daunting. But sometimes she ends up covering for Beth-Ann at the front desk and sometimes she thinks about it. What it might be like if the woman that comes in on Thursdays when the museum is free — the one with the long greying hair and the tired eyes and the wedding ring, were to suggest… something, anything — if Brigitte would. Sometimes she lingers just to talk to Brigitte about photography and books or — their introductory conversation — where Brigitte got her boots, which was perplexing because Brigitte has only ever seen this woman in heels, and she wonders what she looks like when she isn’t downtown, when she isn’t coming in after work, if her husband thinks she’s beautiful in the way that Brigitte does. For months she’s been working up the courage to ask if she can take her picture, but doesn’t know if she’ll ever get there. Sometimes she sees men on the bus who are reading or who double-take her, in all her layers of black at the height of July, her hair wild with summer humidity and wonders how anyone does this. She wonders if anyone else wants to know the taste of stranger’s mouths like she does, but without any of the talking it probably involves.  
  
_A girl can only be a… a slut…_  
  
She doesn’t believe that anymore.  
  
Ghost is always quiet, almost as quiet as Brigitte is, but she sounds too loud with Sam right outside, not six feet away, on the couch. Brigitte doesn’t think he’s asleep, and so she keeps one hand between Ghosts’s thighs and presses the other over her mouth and she’s met with those dark eyes beneath pale eyelashes. They are so familiar with each other — they’ve lived together now for nearly five years and sometimes it’s hard to find the place in their friendship where all of this sits. Brigitte can’t quite look at her like this, so instead she presses her own hips harder into the side of Ghost’s and buries her face in Ghost’s throat and tries to keep her hand soft over Ghost’s mouth while still keeping her quiet. Eventually, the sounds she's making start to shake out un-rhythmically, and Brigitte presses her palm hard against her as Ghost comes around her fingers.  
  
Brigitte waits, but not long enough for her own want to fizzle out. She pulls her hand back, fingers still slick, and takes hold of Ghost’s hips, trailing thin strands of clear wetness over the fabric of Ghost’s underwear as Brigitte presses her down into the mattress until she can find the place, the angle where she can grind against the pale curve of Ghost’s hipbone.  
  
Sometimes she imagines that this is what it feels like when men want you, this hard press of something through his clothes, into her. She searches for something to hold onto, fingers digging into the softness of Ghost’s waist, the fragile bones of her ribcage as she rocks herself against her hip. Unbidden, she thinks _‘he doesn’t like _you_,' _and it feels too good to dwell on what it means she’s remembering that now as she collects every sound she wants to make in the hollow of her own throat and just lets it out in this soft, tight breath.  
  
Ghost’s hands come up and push back her hair, find her face beneath the mess of it. Ghost kisses her jaw and Brigitte grits her teeth because she wants more than this but it’s too late, now, to ask. She’s too close.  
  
She thinks _he’s a cherry hound_. She thinks Sam touches things very carefully and probably wouldn’t catch a wicked fistful of her hair at the back of her neck like Ghost does but that she kind of wants him to, because—  
  
Brigitte doesn’t make a sound as she finally comes, just slams the heel of her hand into the mattress, the tendons starkly apparent as her fingers shake, locked with tension, and then she’s finally breathing again, trying hard to catch her breath. She rolls away, both of them side by side on their backs. Ghost looks over at her, touches the back of Brigitte’s hand with one finger, somewhere between them, until Brigitte’s breathing evens out.  
  
Ghost rolls into her. “Can I stay?” she asks.  
  
Brigitte thinks of Sam outside, innocent to the places her mind just fucking went. She dreads the loneliness that sometimes creeps in after Ghost leaves, and she wonders what will happen when Ghost finally gives in, finally trusts Marcus enough to do anything like this with him. So she nods and, after a minute, rolls to face her, reaching down to find the blankets and pull them up over them both. They fall asleep huddled together, but it’s for a different kind of comfort than before. This always feels more like clinging to each other in a strange forest, an endless night.  
  
“You still need me, right?” Brigitte whispers, just before she drifts off.  
  
Ghost is asleep and doesn’t answer.


	4. Chapter 4

**SAM**

Getting the apartment is easy. It’s a little further from where he works but that’s the price you pay for a place you can afford in this city. To be fair, it’s not altogether that much worse than paying for the greenhouses, just that everything was his to handle and manage back then. It’s actually probably bigger than his setup in the greenhouse was. His bedroom and kitchen are actually in different rooms, now. He thinks that maybe society would consider that an improvement. No balcony. He’d wanted one but he, like Brigitte and Ghost, is right outside rusted out old fire escape that no one uses anymore. He’s going to put plants out there, whether or not they want him to. In his experience, most landlords don’t actually give a fuck about what their tenants get up to.  
  
He doesn’t need any help moving in. He’s got his bag of clothes and necessities, and some things back in Bailey Downs that he can have paid to ship to him whenever he gets around to it. If he gets around to it. On the day he moves in — the day he busses in with Brigitte to the museum and then just kicks around downtown until noon — is also the first day he doesn’t bus home with her. She texts him around seven anyway and asks for his new address and less than an hour later she’s at his door with takeout, looking small and cold in the hallway saying “I figured you wouldn’t have stuff to cook with, so…”  
  
Sam smiles at her and she looks away. She’s not shy, it’s something else, but he remembers it. “You want to see my place?”  
  
She looks over his shoulder, then meets his eyes. “Looks empty,” she says and holds the bag out to him.  
  
He laughs as he takes it, and as soon as it’s out of her fingers, he watches as she takes half a step back.  
  
“Hey, I mean… do you want to stay for a bit?”  
  
Her hand goes to her scarf, pulls it down from her face a little as she considers this, then she says “Okay,” and he steps back to let her pass.  
  
It really is empty. There’s nothing here but his bag, sitting beside a cheap mattress that’s still rolled up in plastic. Brigitte doesn’t say anything. He watches her as she unwinds her scarf and shrugs out of her coat, her eyes wandering over the details of the place. It’s split between wood and tile floors and the place still smells vaguely like fresh paint. When she looks back, he’s watching her. Staring, maybe, and he quickly blinks and straightens up. “Okay,” Sam says, joining her in the main room. “Are you hungry?” he asks, and she nods. They just look at each other for a moment before Sam shrugs and sits down against the wall on the floor of the room that will apparently serve as both living and bedroom once the bed’s unrolled. She follows him down, sitting crosslegged beside him.  
  
“You don’t even have blankets,” she observes, after the noise of containers and plastic has mostly stopped.  
  
“No, I have that, though,” he says, indicating the old fashioned radiator that’s pumping out heat.  
  
“Hope the power doesn’t go out,” Brigitte says.  
  
He didn’t even think of that. “Jesus.”  
  
“I should have brought you a candle or something.”  
  
Sam laughs. He thinks _I missed you_, but doesn’t say it. He really fucking means it though. Christ, does he mean it.  
  
About halfway through supper, Brigitte ventures: “You know, you can stay at ours until you get stuff.” Sam shakes his head. Without even looking at her, he can sense she’s gone still and he knows that, with Brigitte, it’s often easiest to just wait it out, so that’s what he does.  
  
“Was it weird for you?” she asks.  
  
“Was what weird?”  
  
She doesn’t credit him with an answer, but Sam knows she means the other night. Marcus, Ghost… “It’s not really my business,” Sam says.  
  
She looks at him. “But now I’m asking.”  
  
Sam narrows his eyes at her, watches until she twists uncomfortably beneath his gaze, then feels like an asshole and looks away. “Why?”  
  
“What.”  
  
“Why are you asking me?”  
  
She takes a breath, filling her lungs, then says “Forget it,” and starts to get up.

**BRIGITTE**

Sam grabs her hand and she has to catch her breath. He pulls her back down, gentle, and she lets him. “Here’s what I think,” Sam says, releasing her. “I think she’s using you. I think you’re _both_ using each other,” he says.  
  
She’s not looking at him. She can feel him watching her and she tips her chin down so more of her hair falls forward to cover her face. She knows she sounds too defensive when she asks: “Why do you think that?”  
  
“Why?” Sam asks, almost laughing. “She goes out with some guy and then comes home and fucks you instead? You think that’s healthy?”  
  
Brigitte takes that in, lets it settle somewhere, tightly, inside her ribs, and then she looks at him. Sometimes she thinks about how little she looks at other people. Other people are not like Ginger or Ghost, where it’s easy. Sam was like that too, near the end. Easy. Easier than most people Brigitte’s met in her life. She’s never been afraid of Sam, not after she knew him. She’s realized, somewhere along the way, that it’s easier to look at people through a camera lens. There’s a medium, then. A barrier. She’s hidden while they’re in full focus. People get nervous in front of cameras. They get self-conscious. They forget all about her. Sometimes she likes that, but Sam’s always made her feel seen. He’s always sort of looked straight through everything inauthentic and saw _her_.  
  
At least that’s how it felt when she was fifteen. Now the layers around her, insulating her self from the world are thicker, they’re more restricting, and being an adult means that she’s half-forgotten, somehow, who _her_ is. Who Brigitte is. The girl called Bee, she thinks, is still in that basement, and Brigitte doesn’t let herself thinks about her very often.  
  
Whatever she expected to see in Sam’s face, this is something else. His eyes are intense and uncertain and bluer than she remembers. She thinks that Sam looks tired, now, in a way he didn’t in his twenties. It’s deeper than what’s on the surface of his skin. She sees it in herself, too, she thinks, but she doesn’t ever look at herself for very long. It displaces her, because she doesn’t know who she is when it’s just her and her reflection.  
  
“Do you care?” she asks him. Does he care if it’s healthy? Does he care if it’s a woman? Oh fuck, she wants him to care. It washes over her as she lets herself admit it. She wants him to care like he did before, only she can’t bear to lose anything else. She already lost Ginger — the sun in her universe — the thing she and everything else revolved around. So she’d thought. And now there’s Ghost who is slipping further and further away from her, pulled by someone else’s gravity, and she doesn’t know why she does’t have enough to just _keep_ people with her. Why she isn’t good enough. Why she doesn’t have that pull or even how to get it.  
  
_Well_ a voice in her head says — the one that sounds an awful lot like her sister, after she was bitten, the one that’s _not_ Ginger, not really. The bad one. _Why would anyone ever like_ you_?_  
  
It bleeds over into a memory. Her backyard at night, and then: a shadow, a girl. _You know, I feel sorry for you. He doesn’t like_ you.  
  
“Do I care?” he repeats, now, quietly. Everything in her is wound a tight as wires. She feels like she’s about snap, to fly apart into a thousand pieces. God, please, she needs just _someone_ to care. She needs to _know_ it, because she’s so, so tired of playing all these mental games with herself. Because even telling herself, over and over, that Ginger wouldn’t leave her… that Ghost won’t? She’s so fucking afraid, all the time, of being left and it’s a thousand times worse than lycanthropes. She hates herself for needing this. “You know I fucking care, Brigitte.”  
  
“No I don’t,” she whispers. “It’s just words.”  
  
She looks at him, watches his eyebrows go up. “I mean,” Sam says. “If you’ve got any more lore-turned-_very_-fucking-real creatures lurking in your basement you want help with, you know where to find me.”  
  
She laughs a little, a laugh she doesn’t feel because he's right. He cared then — cared enough to follow her into whatever hell her basement was that night. He cared and maybe he still cares now, but if she deserved it back then, she doesn't anymore. She never should have asked. “No more folklore creatures, please,” she says, deadpan.  
  
He takes a second in the silence that follows to try and track this conversation, to gather his thoughts. “I’m not judging you,” he tells her. “You and Ghost and this thing you have. I’m just… things like this don’t often end well. You know? And you seem like…” he knows what he wants to say, but he can’t. Not to Brigitte, not the right way, but she’s not letting him slip out of it that easily. Not now that they’re talking about it.  
  
“What do I seem like?”  
  
Sam looks up and meets her eyes and his heart is slamming into his ribs because she’s not a girl who wants to seem weak. “Like you’re looking for something else. A backup plan, for if Ghost… I dunno… if Ghost works out with that guy. Marcus or whatever his name was—”  
  
Brigitte blinks and then looks away. She has to do something so she starts packing up the empty containers, putting them back in the bag, and like that, she can speak. “When I lost Ginger, it was like the whole world shifted. Like— shook me into this new state of being. I crossed something, some threshold into this place that didn’t have her in it. And I still have no idea how to exist here. I…”  
  
The silence settles too long, and Sam finally, softly, offers something to fill it. “I don’t actually know if anyone really knows how to exist here,” and Brigitte wants to say_ I’m different, this is different_, but maybe it’s not. Just because her world revolved around one red-haired girl — a best friend, a sister, the love of her life, it doesn’t make her different.  
  
“I don’t even know what I want anymore,” she admits, finally, before she collects the trash and straightens up. “I just want it to be easier, sometimes.”  
  
There’s not a trash can, yet, so she says. “I can go… I’ll toss this.”  
  
Sam takes a breath and says “Or you could stay.”

**SAM**

He doesn’t know where he dug up the courage to say that, but it’s out there now and he watches her tense like she’s being pulled straight by a string. She looks sort of feral and strange in the empty apartment. Their voices echo slightly and it feels sort of like a ghost story. Like she’s an apparition. It always kind of felt like that — this girl who never stood close enough to be touched, who appeared and disappeared with barely a sound at one in the afternoon in the greenhouse. Who stayed until well past dark just to talk to him, even after their conversations about lycanthropes wound out and out into nothing.  
  
“I didn’t mean…” Sam says, and he didn’t. Really, he didn’t, but she looks so skeptical that he has to continue. “Look, Brigitte… just…” He thinks _I worry about you_. He can’t say it. Instead he says, “Is anyone home? Is Ghost…?”  
  
“I don’t know. I’m gonna go, though,” she says, and she says it like she doesn’t want to hurt him. “So…” Like she’s run out of steam, she just stops. Turns away and goes to get her winter stuff back on. Sam doesn’t follow. He stays sitting on the floor against the wall and lights a cigarette, listens to her put on boots, coat, scarf.  
  
“Get some furniture. Or at least some blankets, Sam, okay?”  
  
He laughs a little and looks at her, smoke unfurling in the still air between them like ghosts. “Okay,” he says. “Yeah, I will.”  
  
“See you,” she says, soft, and then she’s gone.

**BRIGITTE**

She can’t remember, exactly, what it was that she felt for Sam when she was younger. It had all sort of mixed and faded into whatever they became, and she’d known him for such a short time, a handful of weeks, really. Less than the month of October. She thinks about it on the bus ride back home. She could walk — it’s only about fifty minutes away on foot — but it’s sort of sketchy at night and she hasn’t really trusted things in the night since then. Things that creep and linger in alleyways, things that follow her down the street, just out of the glow of the streetlamps. She knows it’s mostly her imagination, but what if it isn’t?  
  
Sometimes she dreams that Ghost, warm and sleeping against her back, in her bed, that Ghost becomes the wolf there in the darkness, breathing hot and wet onto her neck. There was, Brigitte remembers, this smell to its fur that didn’t belong there, on Halloween. Like meat — coppery and almost bright beneath the animal smell. The dog it had just killed… that’s right. It smelled like that dog.  
  
Brigitte still remembers how easily the dog’s leg had slid away from the rest of it. She remembers how _fast_ the wolf moved. Sometimes it’s easier to think that it was _that_ wolf that took her sister, and not the one inside Ginger herself.  
  
She walks quickly from the bus stop to her apartment and lets herself in to total darkness, like it’s leaked in from outside, from her thoughts, and permeated her whole life. Ghost always forgets to turn the lights off.  
  
Brigitte checks her phone, there in the darkness of the hallway, before she even lets the apartment door fall shut behind her, but there’s nothing, no texts, no messages.  
  
<Where are you?> she sends, and it sits there, unanswered for several seconds. Brigitte turns the hall light on. It’s just her… no one’s been here since she left this morning.  
  
Her phone buzzes in her hand and she looks down at it. <Sorry! I’m with Marcus, forgot to tell you!>  
  
Brigitte’s heart starts pounding in her chest. Or maybe it already was, and she’s just noticing the anxiety, now. Letting herself feel it. Or maybe she’s feeling something else…  
  
<It was just weird to come home to all the lights off> she sends back, and wonders if she sounds as off-hand as she means to.  
  
<hahaha> is only response. Brigitte doesn’t take off her coat for a few minutes, waiting, but there’s nothing.  
  
When she finally does, she takes the phone with her into the kitchen, laying it gently on the counter beside her while she waits for the kettle to boil for tea, but the screen stays silent and black. Brigitte has always been good at being alone. She’s good at not being bored, at filling her time with things that interest her. She’s good at it, always has been. What she isn’t, though, is happy. Not even content. She hates being alone. She’s always hated it.  
  
There’s a part of her that wants to just be self-destructive. To stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom and find every tiny, tiny thing about her reflection that is like Ginger’s because if she does that, she can listen for her. She can whisper her sister’s name to her own reflection and slip back into that space in her mind where Ginger’s with her, but Brigitte is less. Brigitte knows that she has always given up those parts of herself to her sister. She did it willingly, when Ginger was alive. Brigitte wrapped herself in shadows so that Ginger caught more light. And if some of that light was meant for Brigitte, Brigitte always told herself she didn’t need it. What she needed was Ginger’s fingers laced through hers. What she needed was the way _Bee_ sounded on Ginger's tongue; her full attention, those eyes on hers; the bright intensity of her sister’s very presence, that was light and warmth enough.  
  
The apartment is silent and dark and Brigitte is curled up on the couch, tea forgotten and long gone cold, and a book she’s been staring at without actually reading. Her eyes are unfocused, even when they flicker up towards the mirror in the bathroom. She knows that right now, she probably wouldn’t even have to move. The space around her feels so surreal anyway, like it’s all transient. Like she could reach out and pass her fingers through it like cobwebs and find herself on the other side again — where her life really exists. Or she could stay here… in this strange space where she knows… she senses… that she could whisper Ginger’s name now and sense, rather than hear her walk out of the darkness behind her. That she could have Ginger’s voice in her ear — telling her lies, because Ginger’s ghost is always the bitter, cutting little voice in Brigitte’s own head. She could have Ginger rehashing stupid things they did as kids _Hey, ‘member when we…_  
  
Brigitte shuts her eyes and takes a breath, her jaw falling into alignment with the beginning of the word, the name. _Ginge?_  
  
And Brigitte knows the road back. Like with any addiction, it is always colder and harder than giving in. Always, always, worse.  
  
She just has to say her name…  
  
She wonders if she would end up at the clinic again, if she would have to. She wonders if she’d be able to pull herself out of it this time, tonight, knowing that Ghost is with Marcus and that she is estranged from her parents, and that Sam is…  
  
Sam is not even halfway across town.  
  
She’s not used to thinking about Sam. It hurt too much to think about him, about the way he’d screamed his terror, about how she’d betrayed him in the basement after he’d done so much for her. She had too much guilt to think about Sam, before.  
  
Sam, not even halfway across town.  
  
She twists and looks at her phone, and the fog lifts a little. She touches the black screen with her fingertips and thinks about texting him, but she doesn’t. She’ll lose her nerve, and she has to get out of here, she has to—  
  
She takes the bus again and thinks that her pass is probably going to run out of cash soon. She thinks that it’s well past eleven, and he’s probably fucking asleep, but at least she can say she tried. She doesn’t even know what she’s going for, just that she wants to not be alone.  
  
Ginger’s ghost lingers in her mind. Sitting a few seats behind her, somewhere, on the bus, maybe. Maybe trailing her like the fear of that fucking lycanthrope does every night she’s out in the dark, red hair flashing through streetlamp glow like a flickering flame.  
  
She doesn’t let herself think as she reaches Sam’s building and waits for someone passing to let her in, the glass doors catching the glowing light from the shitty entryway with its plastic trees in pots. He’s only on the fourth floor so she takes the stairs. She knows if she stands still in the elevator that she’ll rethink it. She knows that she’ll change her mind and she doesn’t know what happens then. She’s scared to find out how close she really is to the edge of this half-life. These ghosts in her head.  
  
She gets to Sam’s door and freezes. It seems dark inside, quiet. All she hears is her breathing and the soft rustle of her coat. She can’t knock. It’s past midnight now, and she’s frozen on the landing. He might as well be back in Bailey Downs, back in her basement covered in blood, with how far away he feels, how impossible knocking on the door seems.  
  
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and relief cascades through her as she sees it’s from Ghost.  
  
<Hey, I don’t think I’ll be home tonight, just wanted to let you know.>  
  
Brigitte stares at it.  
  
<You’re probably asleep.> Ghost adds. <Miss you.>  
  
Feeling floods out because she can’t hold onto all that fear. Ghost never stays out. Ghost has never stayed out, Ghost always comes home to her. The _miss you_ feels hollow and Brigitte feels like she’s choking on it.  
  
She puts the phone back in her pocket without answering and knocks.


	5. Chapter 5

**SAM**

The knock startles him from a kind of half sleep, and he sits up on the mattress that he’s unrolled on the floor, half-unsure where he is. It’s not quite dark. Not like the greenhouse used to be, way up in the middle of nowhere. Streetlight light floods in and illuminates the backdrop of the kitchen and Sam can find his way to the door without turning on any of the lights inside. He checks first, because it’s the middle of the night in an unfamiliar city and he’s not an idiot.  
  
_Brigitte_. Somehow he’s surprised. He pulls the door open to her wondering _didn’t you go home?_ and half afraid that something has gone wrong. “Hey,” he says “what’s…?”  
  
“You’re right,” she says. “It is unhealthy.”  
  
“You didn’t come all the way back here to tell me that.”  
  
She’s just looking at him, on edge and on the edge of something she’s trying to work out how to say. Sam’s not going to make her stand outside on the landing while she does it. She looks, he thinks, already very uncertain and cold, her face pale against all the darkness she wears, and all the darkness behind her. He reaches out as if to touch her shoulder, but doesn’t, steps aside. “Come on,” he says and she practically melts from the shadows and steps inside.  
  
“You were sleeping,” she says.  
  
“Not really,” he tells her. He doesn’t have anything to offer her at all. Not even water, because he doesn’t have any cups. He moves to flick the light switch on and she says “No, don’t. I should go, sorry.”  
  
“No you shouldn’t,” Sam tells her, but he leaves the light off. “What’s wrong?”  
  
“I have this like… idea, this fantasy that I don’t need anyone. That I can just do everything by myself…”  
  
Something in her voice makes Sam’s chest hurt. He breathes a soft, sympathetic laugh. “No one’s like that.”  
  
“You are. You were, back then.”  
  
“_I_ am,” Sam repeats, voice soft and gentle and filled with disbelief. “Me, the guy that showed up here without a place or directions or so much as change for the bus. The guy you let crash at your place for a week? I don’t need anyone?”  
  
She takes a breath that cracks somewhere in her throat. Hitches there. They’re both very still. She’s not even fully facing him, still all bundled up in her winter gear like she’s planning on bolting. Sam’s afraid she’ll do it if he does anything, but her name sits in his mouth like red clover, sweet and bitter at once. Something simmers between them in the darkness, stirs the air like the moment before lightning. Sam swallows and it sounds loud to his own ears, and then she says “I need to know… you said you care, I need to know why you care.”  
  
Sam feels like that’s not it, not the real question. But they keep coming back to it, again and again. “Why do you keep asking me that? You know the answer.”  
  
“Do you care because you liked me back then?”  
  
“You mean, did I help so I could get something out of you?”  
  
“Yeah, maybe,” she says.  
  
“Told you I didn’t think of you that way.”  
  
Silence. The air feels thick. _Stop being such a fucking coward_, Sam thinks to himself. _You’re hedging._ “I meant that. But I liked you. It was a long time ago, but yeah, I… felt something.” He watches as Brigitte drags her fingers through her hair. Static actually sparks, blue light. Like she’s making magic or something, but really, it’s just dry Ontario winter air. “Why?” Sam asks. “You looking for a backup plan?”  
  
It’s mean, but _he’s_ mean. He’s an asshole, and they both know it. She looks up at him, and there's something calmer about her expression. Because she knows him, still. Knows this about him.  
  
“Are you offering?” she asks.  
  
Okay, he didn’t expect that comeback. He gapes at her and her eyes look dark in the streetlamp light, glittering with that little light, just like they did in her pantry. Half-wild. Desperate. _This_, he thinks, _is taking advantage._ “Brigitte—” he begins, but she practically cuts him off.  
  
“_Are_ you?”  
  
He takes a deep breath through his nose and looks away, out the window thinking that he’s just convenient again. He’s the guy that has something that everyone else needs. Drugs, herb-lore, a van, a warm mouth. He’s the party-thrower, the drug-dealer, he’s the boy that girls like Trina Sinclair want because they’re popular and so: desperately lonesome and uncertain in themselves, but they have an image to maintain. He’s the one person Brigitte has to turn to as the extraordinarily small number of people she cares for drop away from her one by one.  
  
And it would be so easy (because these arrangements generally are. Made on a whim so you can feel guilty about them for weeks). It would be so easy to do it. And he’s wanted to, or he did, before. He wanted to kiss her, touch that wild mess of her hair. He always thought he should have done it, just once, in the pantry before going out after Ginger, but in all sincerity, he thinks she would have bitten his tongue off. She’s one-track, determined as hell. Nothing would have stood between her and Ginger, and he knows that. She’s fiercely loyal and smart and interesting. She was a burning flame in the bleakness of Bailey fucking Downs. Yes, he’s fucking offering, but he’s made this mistake before with girls like Trina. Brigitte’s made the mistake with Ghost, and he wonders if she loves her, or not. He thinks she doesn’t, but that she cares a lot, anyway. Cares too much. More than she should. Brigitte’s not a person who does anything by halves, and Sam’s fucking crazy if he tells himself that he doesn’t still think she’s the best person he’s ever met.  
  
He thinks _Do something right, for once in your goddamn life._  
  
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m offering. But as your friend.”  
  
She’s very still, and he hopes he hasn’t fucked up.  
  
“Look, I—” he starts, voice wound with anxiety. “I just don’t want to ruin this.”  
  
She takes this breath that’s like a yolk falling from her shoulders. It shakes out of her lungs. “Okay,” she whispers.  
  
Relief washes over him instead of disappointment. Sam wants to embrace her, hold her, because she’s just barely holding herself together, but he doesn’t think she’d go for it. She doesn’t seem like the type to hug. He also doesn’t know if he could just leave it at that, in this moment. Right now he feels like he’s wanted to kiss her for eight years. This soft wanting, always quietly drifting beneath the current of the rest of his life.

**BRIGITTE**

She’s lost, then, and shaken. This wasn’t how she saw this going, but it's easier. Just like it’s easier to say that she didn’t think of Sam’s hands in her hair when it was Ghost’s instead. It’s easier to say that she didn’t come here thinking that guys (and so, by default, Sam) wanted one thing, and so it should be easy to get something from him. Something close and intimate and so, so destructive. She wouldn’t have to tell him that it hurt.  
  
Brigitte has never slept with a man. She’d half-thought that the pain it created would be punishment for her stupidity — her reliance on Ghost, and her inability to see that Ghost didn’t look at her the same way; and on top of that, worse, the fact that it is apparently so obvious. That Sam can see right through her to the mess underneath. The mess underneath is far worse, she thinks.  
  
He half reaches for her now, but doesn’t touch her. “C’mere,” he says, “sit down,” and he pushes the mattress against the wall so that they can lean against it like they did earlier that evening, only this time with the mattress beneath them. He is so kind, she thinks. To a fault, some would say, but she doesn’t know if that’s what she thinks. There was always something in Sam’s kindness that she craved, especially because he hid it beneath that stand-offish, sarcastic exterior. _Oh, thank you, I just spent a week of my life looking for you, you can give me a second._  
  
She’d been so caught between her disdain for that, that day on the school grounds, like — who the fuck did he think he was — but also the way he made her stomach flip. Things she denied in herself, back then because she didn’t like guys. But she’d always liked Sam. It was a fucking stupid crush, at first. Until she got to know him and it changed, and honestly… maybe he was more her friend than anything else. That feeling shifted and morphed into something more comfortable. Getting to know Sam was almost like realizing she already knew him.  
  
And then he’d died. Or she thought he had. And now here he is, calling himself her friend like that means more to him than getting into her pants. So she goes. She sheds her coat and boots and sits a foot or so away from him against the wall. He rolls a joint while she settles herself and that makes it less awkward. He’s always been good at pretending to ignore her obvious awkwardness, at keeping himself busy while she struggles to not be at odds with the whole fucking world and the way it works. She’s toying with the hem of her scarf by the time he turns back. It’s still around her neck because she’s cold and it feels protective.  
  
“Do you smoke?” he asks her, meaning the pot and she shrugs a shoulder.  
  
“I don’t really like it,” she tells him.  
  
“That’s okay,” he says, and then “Does she know where you are?”  
  
“She thinks I’m home.”  
  
“You gonna tell her?”  
  
“…I dunno,” Brigitte says. And it’s hard because she loves Ghost, but not like a lover or a partner, and not like a sister. She knows she’ll never love anyone else like she loves Ginger, and even Ginger… even Ginger she hadn’t told, when it came to spending her time with a guy — with Sam. She’d kept it to herself mostly because she knew it would cause misunderstandings, knew it would cause a fight, but… but also… part of her liked having that one secret thing. Part of her had liked that time with Sam was just her own, and that he seemed to like it that way, too. But the reality is that she’s clinging to everyone she can with her fingernails dug in because she constantly feels like she’s losing everyone she cares for. She’s exhausted. The courage comes from desperation and so maybe it’s not real. She doesn’t want to lose Ghost because she doesn’t trust that Sam will be as solid a presence in her life. That he will live with her or sleep with her (because apparently he won’t do either), and she doesn’t trust that it won’t be too hard. Because what if he, like Ghost, finds someone else? Someone better?  
  
Sam takes a drag, lets out the smoke, and then takes a breath and changes the subject. “Was it this cold in Bailey Downs?”  
  
“I don’t think so.”  
  
And they slip into something totally else, some easier conversation. Eventually Sam shifts to the outer portion of the mattress and lies down on his back while she stays huddled against the wall. Eventually, as the sky, somewhere, gets that soft glow on the horizon, Brigitte follows him down, her spine to the wall, and so much space between them it might as well be a sea.

**SAM**

A phone buzzes once, then again, and he wakes up to bright winter sun, casting shadows he hasn’t seen yet across his new apartment, and to Brigitte, still sleeping with her back to him, her scarf wrapped around herself like a blanket, curled up into a tight ball. _Shit_. Sam wonders, _what time is it?_  
  
He reaches out to her and touches her shoulder. She makes a soft response in her throat without really waking up. His voice does it, though. She sits up fast and tousled halfway through his sentence. “Hey. Do you have to be at work?”  
  
She makes a sound that isn’t words but conveys all the meaning of _oh, shit_ as she reaches for her coat to extract her phone from one of the pockets. “No…” she says, then frowns down at her screen for a few seconds. Then: “I have to go,” she says.  
  
“Why? Where?”  
  
She hesitates, because, Sam thinks, maybe they're not really questions he should be asking. At least not with that much disappointment in his tone. It's embarrassing, and she doesn't seem to have the words for an answer, so he offers one: “Ghost?”  
  
Brigitte looks down at her phone in her hands, turning it over once, then says “She’s not home yet.”  
  
"You worried about her?"  
  
"No. I dunno, I just..."  
  
She's obviously never been in this situation before, but he doesn't like to think about her sitting all alone at home, anxious and lost. That's what brought her here last night. “How ‘bout this,” Sam says, gently. “Let me buy you breakfast somewhere. Pay you back for supper.”  
  
She tips her head at him, and he knows she’s about halfway to saying yes but isn’t sure, yet, if she should. “Come on,” he says. “You’re making me a charity case.”  
  
“You’re really good at it, though,” Brigitte says, venturing into mischievousness. Sam laughs.  
  
They set out together into a day that’s surprisingly bright and not that cold. They find a diner neither of them have ever been to, and slide into a cracked vinyl booth in the corner, surrounded mostly by old people having breakfast, both of them so wildly out of place that it’s funny, and he thinks — watching her wrap her hands around her coffee across the table, that this is something good. Something he wants to hang onto.  
  
Neither of them work that day, and he’s not really sure which one of them coerces the other into going to find blankets and kitchen things but he’s fairly certain that she had something to do with it.  
  
It’s past noon by the time they get back with bags of stuff. “Why didn’t you keep your van?” she asks as they drop most of it into the living room space.  
  
“I dunno,” Sam says, it felt… like part of something that I didn’t want to be a part of anymore.”  
  
She goes still as he passes her, carrying a box of dishes into the kitchen. “ ‘Cause of Halloween?”  
  
Sam doesn’t answer right away. He remembers all those nights driving home. The van felt haunted, or something. Like all the sunlight and sweeping and scrubbing in the world couldn’t have gotten what happened in there out. Ginger died there, he thinks. There in the van, and not in the house. There was so much blood in the back, torn scraps of clothes, the crushed remains of a bird skull necklace. Scrapes and gouges left by something inhuman.  
  
“I dunno,” he says softly, and turns to catch a movement in the corner of his eye. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway. “It wasn’t good on gas,” he tells her.  
  
She twists her mouth a little, but lets it drop. Or so he thinks.  
  
While they were out, Sam had ordered furniture to be delivered later that day. She leaves before the movers come and Sam wants to ask her to text him or something, but he thinks maybe things will settle, now. She’ll work it out with Ghost and they’ll all sort of go back to normal, or whatever it is that they’re trying to do.

**GHOST**

Ghost comes home when she’s done work late in the afternoon. It’s winter and the sun is already beginning to set. She’s got groceries in one hand and her schoolbag on because she had to go to her university library after work and she’s out of breath by the time she gets all the way up the stairs. The lights are on. It smells like coffee. Brigitte’s here. Sam isn’t. She senses that almost as soon as she gets in the door. She likes it better when Sam isn’t here, but she hasn’t said as much to Brigitte. Usually things like that are considered rude.  
  
“Hi,” Ghost says, dropping her bag and putting the groceries on the counter. Brigitte’s waiting for the coffee machine to be done and she’s huddled into the corner of the counter.  
  
“Hey,” Brigitte answers, watching. Something strange, a heavy silence, hangs between them and it makes Ghost’s skin crawl a little bit but she tries to shake it off. She’s good at that. She thinks a lot of bad or scary things throughout the day that she has to push to her peripheral until she can deal with them better.  
  
“Are you making coffee?” Ghost asks the obvious question.  
  
“There’s enough for two. I thought you might be home…”  
  
That’s her in, Ghost thinks, and she takes it. She gives Brigitte a smile, unguarded, honest, but she can’t quite shake her anxiety. There’s so many things that happened, so much she wants to tell her, but everything’s altered now, so she doesn’t know how. She’s afraid of a fight. Ghost has never been good with conflict — not in words. Sometimes bad things happen when she doesn’t check her words first. People have left her a lot. She doesn’t want Brigitte to leave.  
  
She stands on her toes to get some rice into the top cupboard, followed by Mr. Noodle.  
  
“That stuff’s bad for you,” Brigitte says.  
  
“Only if you don’t put water in. It turns into wax in your stomach.”  
  
Brigitte pulls a face. “I don’t think that’s how that works.  
  
Ghost shrugs a shoulder, smiles again. If she smiles she can say something wrong or do something wrong, and have it be taken the way she means it. The right way. If she smiles it means she’s trying. Or faking. Brigitte's good at telling the difference.  
  
The air changes. Brigitte’s trying, too, and Ghost knows that. Usually things like this, it’s better to let Brigitte come around to it on her own time, otherwise she goes into lockdown, so Ghost waits.  
  
“How did things go with Marcus?” Brigitte finally gets out, and then steps forward to help with the groceries. A peace offering, or the hope for one.  
  
Ghost bites her lip, but she can’t stop the smile. “It was good. I mean—” it wants so badly to spill out of her, this information, and Brigitte is the only real friend she has, besides Marcus. She’s the only one who will care. Brigitte is also the only one who it will hurt. “So, we slept together.” Ghost squeezes one of the drawer handles until her knuckles turn white.  
  
“Okay. Did you— use something?”  
  
There’s a weird hitch in her voice. She’s slipped away, somewhere for a moment, and Ghost looks at her. Brigitte meets her eyes.  
  
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, we were really careful. He was really… careful. It was nice. Are you mad?”  
  
“No,” Brigitte says, quickly, but she means it. Ghost knows that. Brigitte tries so hard to be good. Most people don’t recognize that.  
  
“I haven’t really heard from you,” Ghost says, “So I thought maybe you were mad.”  
  
“I’m not mad.”  
  
“I’m not leaving you,” Ghost says.  
  
“There’s nothing to leave. It was an arrangement, that’s all.”  
  
“You know what I mean,” Ghost says.  
  
“So what does Marcus think?”  
  
Ghost watches her, then shakes her head a little. “What can he say? This is who I am. I don’t just sleep with you because it’s convenient.”  
  
Brigitte looks away, face hidden in her hair. “You don’t have to explain it to me, Ghost.”  
  
“Well, I don’t.”  
  
“But I think we should stop,” Brigitte says. “If you’re… serious about Marcus or whatever.”  
  
Ghost feels a rush of something that she can’t read as disappointment or relief. She’s scared because things are changing, like she knew they would and hoped they wouldn’t.  
  
“But—”  
  
“I’m not leaving you either,” Brigitte says. She says it so softly Ghost barely hears her over the sound of the coffee machine.  
  
Ghost presses her lips together, blinking back tears. Something’s wrong. It’s off but she doesn’t know what, and getting a handle on all of it is too hard. It’s all too new.  
  
The machine beeps and Brigitte turns towards it, and away from her. But she makes Ghost’s coffee first, the way she likes it and when their fingers overlap as Ghost takes it from her, neither one of them pulls away too soon.  
  
That night, neither of them sleeps in their own bed. They fall asleep at opposite ends of the couch together, because neither one of them is entirely sure how to share a bed anymore, without moving backwards — it is so easy to just get inside each other. It would be like covering up the cracks that have formed in their tenuous arrangement, revealing that the foundations aren’t so strong after all — and neither one of them is ready to sleep alone because that means moving forward. It means leaving something behind.  
  
So they stay where they are, on the threshold of something else but, Ghost thinks, it’s like they’ve lost something to hold onto. It used to be that she could catch Brigitte’s hand and feel better. There was something about the way Brigitte held back that made Ghost feel safe.  
  
She always held onto Ghost’s fingers so tight.


	6. Chapter 6

**BRIGITTE**

More and more Ghost is with Marcus, but Brigitte — alternating between keeping herself as busy as possible and hovering around Sam's place like an unobtrusive but, she thinks, probably somewhat annoying little spectre, she feels like she's doing what she always does, which is coping.  
  
Sam never says anything. He always opens his door to her, but she wonders if he feels like he has to because she let him crash at her and Ghost's place. She has to have outstayed her welcome by now though, she thinks. It's almost the new year, and she isn't sure she wants to go into it being so desperately dependant on people who are only doing her a favour. Sometimes she even thinks that Ghost would rather be at Marcus's rather than with her at home. It's not like they lead a very exciting life. Both of them are often content to just hide from the cold at home and read or draw or watch whatever's on TV. She tries to tell herself that that’s just self-defeating talk. She tries not to humour it.  
  
Now that Ghost's not here, though, Brigitte can watch horror movies. It's weird, there's this sense that it's something she's not supposed to be doing. Like the feeling of the movie itself settles into the rug and onto the furniture, coating it in some kind of horror movie essence. They're not like what she remembers. They don't scare her anymore, or something. There's always this underlying sensation that they're not as make believe as they seem. After all, didn't she used to think werewolves were just a fairytale?  
  
At the same time, Brigitte has always thought that certain places from her childhood were haunted. Ginger sometimes humoured her, sometimes laughed her off, and Brigitte got the sense that she didn't feel what Brigitte did in graveyards and old places. That there were layers and layers of lives not just their own. Maybe ghosts were just energy or a collection of memories or maybe they really were spirits of the dead, separated by the thinnest fabric from their world and this.  
  
She brings all this up to Sam on New Year’s Eve when she's infiltrated his flat again. He has furniture now. "Like a real person," she'd him upon entering, and he'd sort of laughed and sort of just exhaled smoke and said "I _am_ a real person."  
  
Sam believes in ghosts, but in an electromagnetic energy kind of way which, Brigitte thinks, is better than a trick-of-the-light kind of belief. "Maybe you're a ghost," she says softly, going through the books he's got in a milk carton. It's something she's thought before, since he'd come back again. It makes something shudder low inside her and she wishes she hadn't said anything. She changes the subject instead, indicating the books. "Where'd you get these?"  
  
"Pandemonium," Sam says and looks at her like he wants to see if she gets it. She sees it through her hair, and uses it as a curtain to hide behind as she lets herself smirk a little. There is a shop called Pandemonium. She sees it sometimes when she goes with Ghost down there to see shows. Pandemonium, of course, is also the capital of Hell.  
  
"You're sort of pretentious."  
  
"Says the girl who's also read _Paradise Lost_."  
  
"Only the parts with Lucifer," she responds.  
  
It's easy, she thinks, to be with him. It always has been easy, and she likes that. It's such a relief. Their silences are the kind that she and Ghost had to grow into. She doesn't ever remember it being like that with Sam. Sometimes she thinks of telling him that. To what end...  
  
But the thought of telling him something like that seems almost excessive, somehow. It makes her face heat up just thinking of it. It's not altogether that useful, anymore though, to deny that she's curious. That she thinks about him in ways she shouldn't, and now, maybe, he knows. It's not like she was overly discreet, last time, when she asked him if he was offering.  
  
It was nice of him, she thinks, to say that he was there for her as a friend, but at the same time there's something about that that annoys her. Like she should think he's noble or something, for turning her offer down. Maybe he just doesn't think she's pretty enough to fuck. But still, she was relieved when he told her that he'd be there for her without the intimacy.  
  
But what is intimacy anyway. Why does it have to be all about sex all the time? Sometimes Brigitte thinks that she'd just like Sam to touch her the way he touches other things. Plants, his cigarettes, the book he's paging through now, at her side. He smells like smokes and outside and something darker, like soil or roots. She goes still and keeps her head down.  
  
"I thought you might like this, actually," he tells her, holding the book he has out to her. She takes it from him gently; it’s _Wide Sargasso Sea_. “It’s like… _Jane Eyre_, told from the perspective of Bertha Mason. She’s the—”

“Madwoman in the attic,” Brigitte finishes the sentence.

“Yeah, exactly. Kind of like a prequel. It’s… yeah, I… thought you might like it.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to,” he says. “Buy me a drink or something.”

Brigitte looks up at him. Instead of _thank you_ she says “Bertha Mason reminds you of me?”

**SAM**

He laughs. “Not— no.” If anything, he thinks, Brigitte is the opposite of excess. But there’s something about that that isn’t wrong. “It’s not Bertha, it’s… I don’t know.” The feeling of the book maybe, he thinks. Maybe that’s it. 

She reads the back of it quietly and Sam doesn’t realize he’s watching her until she looks up. Then he’s caught. There’s a beat between them, and then Brigitte says. “Now?”

“‘Now’ what?”

“That drink. Is it okay if we just go to the liquor store and bring something back, because I don’t really want to go out.”

He’s not sure what to do with this, really, because when he said ‘buy me a drink’ he meant it more like ‘don’t mention it.’ Now that she’s actually offering, he’s not going to turn her down, but he wonders if maybe she doesn’t want to go out because it’s too much like a date. He almost asks her if that’s the reason, but for someone who reiterated their friendship last time she tried to nudge their relationship into something different, he’s treading awfully close to the tipping point.

**BRIGITTE**

They get all their winter gear on and step out into the hallway to wait for the elevator. "What do you drink?” Sam asks her, and she kind of has to think about it before she answers 'gin.'  
  
"Really?"  
  
"What."  
  
"You strike me as more of a... white wine."  
  
Brigitte scoffs and looks at him sidelong through her hair. “What about you? You’re still drinking Old Goose?”

“Old Goose is _not_ a bad rye.”

“It comes in a plastic bottle. Is that what you want?” The elevator arrives with a somewhat alarming clang as the doors struggle to open for them. Sam thinks about eight times a week that if he dies young, it’ll probably be directly related to this elevator.

“I’m willing to let you educate me on gin, if you want,” he says, following her in. The doors taking an eternity to close and the clanging, shaky decent begins. She huddles into a back corner, leaning against the wall and he takes a spot on the wall opposite. They’re facing each other and she kind of cocks her head at him in a way that makes him feel nervous and intrigued. He smiles at her, just to break the energy of that look but she doesn’t fall for it. She never has. He remembers being totally thrown by that when they first met. He’d thought he could impress girls until Brigitte Fitzgerald.

Tell me,” she says, looking away from him and watching the little light flicker from floor four to three to two. “Is this what you’d be doing on New Year’s if you had anything better to do?”  
  
Sam's eyes find hers fast, and they are dark and wary and she thinks that she likes him like that. She lets him search her eyes. “Who says I don’t?” he asks her.

That gives her pause, but just for a second. She rolls her eyes to cover it up and says. “Like what?”

“Does it matter?” Sam asks. “You texted and said you wanted to come over. If I had plans, I changed my mind.”

She wants to ask why, but it’s too self-deprecating. Instead she says “If you could be doing anything you wanted, right now, what would you do?”  
  
“Anything I wanted?" he repeats and Brigitte nods. Sam’s very still. He isn’t normally. He normally fidgets or shifts his weight. “Why, are you offering?” he asks her, an echo of before, and she feels her fingers curl into fists as heat floods her. She'd meant for the evening, the holiday. This is totally different, but it gets her. So Brigitte just tips her chin up, looking at him straight on instead of from beneath her hair. It's an invitation and he takes it, stepping forward to close the distance between them just as the elevator jostles them to the ground floor. She thinks he's going to kiss her, she expects him to kiss her, but he doesn't. Instead he gently touches her hair just above her left ear, and then he buries his fingers in it, palm coming around to cradle her skull, fingers gently curled, tugging through knots. Brigitte takes a soft, shallow breath — her stomach clenching as she thinks about the first time she thought of his hands like this, his hands in her hair. It's all tangled up with Ghost's soft thighs and the softer heat between them and Brigitte is able to hold his eyes, that way, only half-here. An eternity passes. The doors jostle open to the empty lobby. Neither of them move, but she feels a flicker, a little twitch through Sam's arm and she thinks if he pulls away now they’ll never find their way back here again. And she doesn't want him to. She's brave now. She watches him like a challenge, daring him not to pull away even as she feels her muscles tighten sharply in her neck, and she twitches beneath his touch as the silence and the tension thickens between them. The elevator doors close again, but the box doesn't move.

**SAM**

It's impossible, ridiculous, but he thinks this is one of the most intimate moments he's ever experienced. He can read so much in Brigitte's eyes, and he thinks it might be the longest she's ever just looked at him. Sam takes a breath, or tries, but can't quite manage a lungful. He told himself he wouldn't, but this feels different. She's not just here out of desperation this time, and she's got something assured in those green eyes. Christ, they are the softest green he's ever seen. Sam wets his lips. For once, he doesn't think about the pantry and the wolf outside the door. Instead he just thinks about kissing her, and then he does it.  
  
She responds immediately, the thin frame of her against him. Her boots scrape the carpeted floor, rolling salt tracked in from the street beneath them as she steps into him, and Sam catches her face in both hands for an instant and presses back. And it is so good, so fucking compatible somehow, because she doesn't just go pliant, she matches his intensity. He feels the tug of his jacket near his shoulders where she's clinging to the fabric. She opens her mouth and licks the inside of his and he thinks _Right, okay_, and reaches out to hit the button to his floor again. Fuck the liquor store. Fuck the goddamn Toronto cold.

**BRIGITTE**

She doesn't think either of them notice the ascent. On his floor he tugs her out into the hallway and she thinks (he’s got both hands in her hair now _oh, fuck_) that she’s never been kissed in public before. It’s not even public, there’s no one around. Everyone that lives here probably all went out to parties, or out drinking. Sam shifts back slightly, and then there's a sharp crash that makes her jolt away from him, startled. 

“Jesus,” Sam says, and stoops to pick up his house keys. He meets her eyes as he straightens. ”We’re doing this backwards, we're supposed to be drunk first."  
  
It’s a joke, she thinks, because he’s still looking at her like he _wants_ to be doing this. “I mean,” she says, “you’re also supposed to wait until midnight to kiss me, and it’s only like nine-thirty, so…”

**SAM**

She actually checks her watch. It’s still that dorky digital watch she had when she was a teenager and he gets this rush of emotion that he doesn’t really know what to do with. He thinks _I’ve waited years to kiss you, who cares about midnight._ What he says, though, is: “Yeah, we really fucked this up.”

“I think all that stuff’s lame, anyway. Like New Year’s traditions. It’s just a setup for disaster. Likely to end up puking and crying on a bathroom floor somewhere.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” he says. He toys with his keys because she's talking out of nerves, he thinks, and he's not really sure where all this is going now. He looks at Brigitte and thinks _Maybe she needs an out._ “I mean… but if you wanted to go puke and cry in someone else’s bathroom… that's also fine.”

She looks up and there’s almost a smile. “That's okay.”

He pushes it further. “You could keep your reputation.”

“What’s my reputation?”

Sam breathes a laugh and doesn’t know how to answer that. “I don't know,” he tells her, even as he thinks _untouchable_. "Uncategorized."

She twists her mouth a little, not entirely believing him maybe. She swallows, her eyes moving once between his, and then she asks “What happens to my reputation if I stay here?”

And it’s such a genuine question. Sam stills and looks down at his keys in his hand before meeting her eyes again. “You know it’s not just you, right? Like, you know I’m in this.”

She holds his eyes for a moment, then nods towards his door. “You should probably let us back in, then.”

So he does.

**BRIGITTE**

She knows exactly what she’s doing, what this is as she follows him inside, and as soon as she closes the door it overwhelms her. This fear that this is all going to go wrong the way it did with Ginger, with Ghost. She takes a breath and, hidden beneath her hair she tells her shoes “I can’t keep depending on everyone else.”

She looks up and sees Sam’s got his fingers at the top button of his coat, but he keeps his eyes on her and doesn’t move.

“Not even you,” she tells him.

Sam takes a breath and lets his eyes wander his apartment. He's disappointed. She can see it, and she feels... bad, maybe. She knows that this isn't how this is supposed to go, but she's getting tired of lying to herself. When he looks at her again he says, quiet and steady: “I know.” And she chooses to believe him, because she wants this — she wants whatever they started in the elevator, she wants to see if she can sever whatever this thing is that draws her to Sam by letting him get close. Maybe then they can just get it over with and find a way to just be friends, plain and simple. He reaches out and cups her face in his hands, his fingers and her hair caught against her jawline. Maybe this won’t complicate everything. 

“So, okay?” Sam whispers. Maybe guys only want one thing. She nods anyway, and he kisses her again and she kisses him back. Maybe it won’t get fucked up. Already, there’s this ache building inside her. Her fingers fall to the buttons of his jacket and she undoes them one by one.

Maybe she’s kidding herself.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a liar. I cannot write short stories anymore, apparently, so there will be ONE more chapter (Probably two, I know, I KNOW, but ONLY two) after this one. We are winding down, I swear.

**SAM**

This, this whole moment feels sort of surreal. It’s the dead of winter, and so it could be nine-thirty or it could be one in the morning, it’s the same dark outside. The apartment is still illuminated enough by the city lights outside that neither of them bother turning any lights on again. His hands are busy anyway, and Brigitte is the only thing that feels immediate and solid right now.

He can’t really think while she’s kissing him except to think that _she, Brigitte, is kissing him._ There’s these vague moments of greater awareness, like the moment she pulls the scarf from her neck like a long dark snake. It hisses as it slides between her coat and her skin. He takes that moment to shrug out of his own jacket, his eyes on her as she twists the scarf once, twice around her hand to pull the entire length of it off, then drops it onto the floor.

Each time they kiss again, it’s a decision. There is no flurried, desperate shedding of clothes, no clattering of their teeth as they bring their mouths together too quickly. They are consciously choosing to keep going, again and again and that, Sam thinks, is why it feels so intense. Because he has to think, because he has to connect with her. Because she’s always had something that he finds _so easy_ to connect with, she _always_ has. Even though it took her days and days to even meet his eyes once when they’d first met, there was something there. Not even attraction, not romantic, it’s a pull — like she’s a mirror, or he is. Something that steadies him, rather than completes him. Sam’s been alone long enough to understand that he’s never going to find what’s missing in him in someone else. What he found in Brigitte though, support, maybe; understanding; trust. That’s something else. Something real and tangible. 

Beneath her shirt — after the layers of jacket and sweater have been removed and Sam is shirtless and shivering, and hard anyway — she’s not wearing a bra. She lets him run his hands up her back, from her waist to her hair again, and there’s no stop-jolt of the strap beneath the thin fabric. She pulls her shirt over her head just before he reaches out to do it himself. 

His eyes fall first to this dark bloom at the centre of her chest which, at first, in a horrible, sick, anxious twist of shock, he thinks is a bruise, and then his eyes figure it out in the dim light and he realizes it’s a tattoo. Starkly lined. Brigitte touches it almost like she wants to keep it to herself, her pale hand half covering the image of two bird-skulls, inked almost as if they’re fused. Both face the same way, one tipped up to point towards her left shoulder, the other down towards her left hip, creating a dark almost-semi-circle around her breast, and he remembers the necklaces. He found the shattered remains of Ginger’s in the back of his truck. He realizes, now, for the first time that he doesn’t know what happened to Brigitte’s, but here they are, drawn forever into her skin. There are no flowers or vines around the skulls, just a dark curve, a black crescent moon filing in the spaces at the backs of their skulls to make it more circular. It’s beautiful, and it breaks his heart. He meets her eyes and she opens her mouth like she might say something, explain herself, but she doesn’t. He doesn’t need her to, anyway. He thinks it must have hurt. Her ribcage is so close to the surface of her skin and the lines are heavy and delicate at once. Maybe that’s why she did it. Because Sam’s scars are still vivid across his throat and his chest and in his side where the wolf dragged him downstairs. He saw her looking at them, but she already knew they were there. Brigitte doesn’t have any scars from that night — Halloween, or the night he ran over the wolf. Maybe this is her way of atoning for that, even though Sam thinks that she shouldn’t have had to.

He touches her belly, above the high waist of her skirt and she lets him. He’s still getting used to that fact. That she lets him, now, suddenly, when she’d seemed so closed off before. She’s covered in goosebumps but she’s not shivering,

**BRIGITTE**

She starts shivering later, when she’s warm beneath the blankets on Sam’s bed. It shakes itself out of her thin frame because she doesn’t know where to put all of her intensity, so she just tries, hopelessly, to contain it inside herself. Sam’s mouth is very, very soft on her neck. He doesn’t use his teeth or try to leave any marks, and for now she likes that. She likes his softness, because it allows her to shudder beneath it and not get hurt. In more ways than one.

“You okay?” he whispers. It’s dark and he is very warm and so very familiar, so she nods and he says (she doesn’t have to look at him to know he’s got that uncertain almost-smile) “You sure? ‘Cause you’re shaking…”

It’s been dawning on her since they locked the apartment door behind them, that this is going to have to turn into honesty hour, into some kind of conversation, but she’s been dreading it, because she’s not very good at these sorts of things, like, at all. She takes a breath and sits up a little. They’re both still wearing underwear, but not much else, and she’s glad she’d been undressed and undone in front of Ghost so many times because that makes it easier for her to be this way in front of Sam. She’s always felt kind of detached from herself, anyway. She likes what she can do for people. It’s easier than asking for things, easier than taking things for herself. 

When she sits up, Sam draws back, and even in the dim light she can see the concern in his eyes, the way he gives a shit about her, and her shaking and she gets this rush of feeling she’s not able or willing to deal with right now, in this moment, so she pushes it aside and meets Sam’s eyes, and chooses simple honestly, because that often seems like the best policy with him.

**SAM**

She looks at him and asks, in that low, soft voice “You ever want something a lot?” and it’s so, so simple and Sam _looks_ at her but doesn’t touch her for the moment and says “Yeah. Yeah, I have.” And he knows that he should, maybe, assess this. That they should. He sort of feels like at this point he's just going to have to brace himself for heartbreak, because this can’t go smoothly, these things never do. But then again, it’s Brigitte, who has never been anything other than logical and capable, and straightforward, and impossibly self-possessed. He wonders again what he wondered back then, when she was fifteen and maybe just at the beginning of the lost she still seems to be right now which was: _Who’s taking care of _you_?_

She’d seemed so alone. He’d wanted to help take that away from her. Give her back to someone or maybe (he hadn’t let himself think it until they were on their way to her house in the van, a creature that was no longer a girl in the back) he’d wanted to step in and be that person. More than he had been, more solidly. He wanted to be _someone_ to her. Not just the guy with the botany books and the means of transportation. He wanted to be more than the guy she told she’d come to see later, when he met her at school. He still hasn’t figured out how to be that person, and he thinks she probably doesn’t even want him to be.

It’s not hard to see that she’s still holding out for a dead girl, for a sister, for someone… else. Someone who, Sam thinks, Ghost probably fits the bill for way more than he ever could. But Brigitte is here, now. She’s here with him. 

She’s here and she’s saying _you ever want something a lot?_ and Sam… Sam thinks that maybe right now he could say something. Something to explain himself to her — all this… “Yeah, you know, Brigitte, I—”

She makes this sharp, sudden half movement as though to stop him, but doesn’t complete the gesture. Sam stops anyway, always in tune to her. Always. The space between them, the things left unsaid, the way she can talk at length if you let her, all the thoughts she spoke out loud to him, years ago in a way she hasn’t done since then. She reigns herself in even tighter, now, but there’s an intensity in her that he doesn’t think was there, before, or he wasn’t looking, or told himself he wasn’t.

“Later, okay?” she says. He meets her eyes, and there’s something there, this quiet desperation.

“Later,” he repeats.

She takes a deep breath, fills her lungs, and then she kisses him again.

Sam kisses her back, but he still hasn't touched her the way he wants to. It seems impossible, somehow, and he has never felt so seen by a girl he's ended up in bed with. Other girls — they filled the space. Touching and kissing and moaning and writhing. With Brigitte, it's very quiet. It's so fucking quiet that he can hear the radiator ticking all the way across the room as he moves from her mouth to her jaw to her throat and she lays back beneath him, shivering. Her hands tremble as they ghost down his sides, barely a touch. He presses his open mouth to her collarbone, to the inside of her breast. She tenses. He feels it all the way down the line of her, that stiffening in her thighs, in her arms. It's like hitting pause, she doesn't even blink. He looks up at her and meets her eyes and for a moment neither of them move. She pushes careful fingers into his hair, and he takes that as a sign that he can keep going, so he does, only slower. Thinks maybe this is moving too fast for her.  
  
As his lips drift to the dark lines of that twin birdskull tattoo she tightens her fingers in his hair and twists her body away slightly. Okay, he thinks, he gets it now. "Sorry," he whispers.   
  
She doesn't respond. She looks like she wants to, but words are too much right now, an explanation would ruin this. He doesn't need one, she doesn't want that. "Sorry," he says again, still quiet, moving back up, feeling her relax as he moves further from those dark lines. She pulls him down to kiss her, but never quite looks at him and he lets her do that, feels her exhale shakily against his skin. The kiss is very slow and tentative. Distracted.  
  
"Brigitte," he says against her mouth. "You okay?"  
  
"Yeah," she breathes.  
  
He kisses her cheekbone, her ear. "Sure?"  
  
She nods. For a moment her touch in his hair is gone, but then she brushes his shoulder, pushes until he rolls off of her and onto his side and she slots herself right up against him, and that's better — he feels it immediately — that's safer. Her hips are sharp where they press into his but the way she presses herself right against his dick takes his mind off of pretty much anything else immediately. She's warm and her thighs are warm and he reaches down to grab one and hook it over his hip so he can press harder against her and she sighs like she likes that and Sam is practically overcome.  
  
So that's what they do, for a while, time slipping away between them. Outside, somewhere, a car alarm is going off, and Sam's fingers slip further and further around to the back of her thigh until he can graze his fingers along the crotch of her underwear, still rocking himself against her clit.  
  
She breathes “Hahh, fuck," and her words are half-startled, but so heavy with want that it's almost surprising in the quiet room. It's the first time either of them have made a sound in long, long minutes, save for the soft sound of skin and cloth and bedclothes. He laughs a little and she does, too, self-conscious, but the laughter sweeps away the embarrassment. He does it again and she swallows the sound and lets him, and after that it doesn't take so very long for the rest of their clothes to be shed.

**BRIGITTE**

She wants it so badly. It's a different feeling from when she grinds against Ghost's hipbone, or the heel of Ghost's hand while she strokes her fingertips against the slickness between Brigitte's legs. It's not that she doesn't love Ghost's softness, or the salt taste of her, or the blonde hair between her legs and on her shins that is so pale she doesn't bother to shave it. It's not that she doesn't love the slick, soft feeling of her own fingers inside Ghost's cunt, it's that she's been looking for this sensation, too. Of Sam, warm and hard. It contrasts, somehow — this press of his length against her pubic bone, against her belly — with the impossible gentleness of his hands. She reaches down to hold him against herself, sliding against his cock but not letting him inside and he whimpers against her neck and she likes that. It's this feeling she tried to find with her fingers inside her own body (a feeling she always hated), and then later realized was better when she just ground against the hard curved line of her wrist and thumb, fingers digging into the inside of her own thigh until she came. She doesn't like things inside of her. She wonders if that makes her... less, somehow.  
  
She thinks about how, before, she could have let Sam take her and not told him she'd never slept with a man. So that it would hurt. It had been meant to punish herself, but now that she's got him as naked as they are, and as vulnerable as she's ever seen him (outside of having his throat torn out) she can't do that to him. He deserves better and, she thinks, maybe she does, too. It's just hard to remember that, sometimes.  
  
She doesn't want to hurt right now. She doesn't want Sam to hurt anymore. She touches the scars on his neck, lays her palm over them and then wills herself away from the rocking of his hips against hers, because she's getting close, she can feel it, and she's always been told that sex with guys happened one way, and this isn't it. And maybe he's just been humouring her this whole time. She wonders if it seems juvenile, to him. She wonders what he thinks of her, and for a moment she considers putting an end to all of it and just... leaving, going home. But then he looks at her, breathless, pupils blown huge and dark and she thinks _no, he's in this_. He's here with her.  
  
"Do you have something?” she asks.  
  
A beat, and then ”Yeah. Do you want…? What do you want?"  
  
She's caught between answers, and she doesn't know which to choose. "I... haven't done this with a guy, but we can, if you want."  
  
Sam's eyebrows rise like he's shocked at this news. She presses her lips together.  
  
“You—... What?" Sam asks, tone changing as he realizes she’s smirking. He half sits up, and she realizes it's cold without him so close.  
  
"You just looked shocked,” she tells him.  
  
"I am shocked. I'm... really?"  
  
"Just Ghost."  
  
Sam fidgets a little, looks away. "This is a... fucking mood-killer, but are you sure you even want to do this?"  
  
"Ghost and I aren't together."  
  
"Aren't you?" Sam asks. "I mean, you've lived with her for years, you've been... that's practically common law.  
  
Brigitte sighs. She pushes herself up onto her elbows. "We're not together," she repeats. "We're friends."

**SAM**

_We're friends._  
  
_Okay_, Sam thinks, _so then what are we?_ "You gonna tell her?"  
  
Brigitte furrows her brow a little. She's not looking at him. "Yes," she says, defensively. "What's it _matter_ to you?"  
  
"Just trying to read this. I don't want to misunderstand."  
  
"What's there to misunderstand?"  
  
"I'll tell you how I see it," Sam says. "Marcus is Ghost's boyfriend, Ghost is your friend, and I'm just... convenient."  
  
That hits a nerve. Brigitte winces, all that tension coming back into her shoulders as she sits up. She finds her shirt and Sam doesn't try to stop her, but dread floods him. They've already gone way too far, he thinks, to repair this. They'll always have done this now.  
  
"Why does it bother you so much?” she asks him. She's not getting dressed, but she's holding the shirt balled up against her chest like a cat. “I thought this sort of thing would be easy for you.”  
  
Sam looks at her, right in the eyes, and there's a beat. What is he supposed to do? She _knows_ this, he thinks. She knows that _this sort of thing_ is different from just a quick fuck. She _knows_ that he'd do anything for her, walk into hell with her _again_. She knows that, doesn’t she? Because he— "Don't make me say it, " he says, and his voice is low but it comes out tired. "Not like this, that isn't right." 

Not when they're on the brink of a fight.  
  
She takes that in and he just has to sit there and wait and it's fucking horrible. She cocks her head to the side, her eyes intense in the dim light. She has to work herself up to saying whatever it is, and he waits, on fucking tenterhooks.  
  
"You're not just convenient," she says and for some reason, that makes Sam have to look away from her. "It was never like that," she continues, "but you have to let me handle Ghost on my own. Stop interfering, I'm... I'm dealing with it."  
  
"You don't have to do everything by yourself."  
  
"Well I'm trying not to." Her voice shakes on the edge of something caught between anger and hilarity. Because that’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s here, with him, now, for some need she could surely fill in the privacy of her own apartment, her own bed. But she’s asking him if he wants to, and it’s too much of a gift, Sam thinks, to pass up.

He doesn’t smile, but part of him wants to. She’s funny, but he’s more worried than anything else — of things falling apart for her and Ghost, for her and him. But at the same time, he’s got her in his bed, undressed and determined as ever and, christ, he knows her. And she knows herself, or at least she knows what she wants. 

_'How ‘bout you take this and we blow?'_  
_'How about_ no.'

“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay, yeah, she's your friend, you can handle it. You're right."  
  
"You're also my friend."  
  
"This what you do with your friends?"  
  
"Seems like it," Brigitte retorts, but they’re edging back into something else, something easier. The air doesn’t feel heavy anymore.

**BRIGITTE**

He's right. It does seem that way. But then, they're her only friends. Maybe if she had more it would be different. Maybe she can't tell the difference between friendship and... this. She never shook when she was with Ghost.  
  
She misses her sister, and she doesn't know what any of that means. With Ginger, it was always easy until it wasn’t or, at least, that’s how she remembers it.  
  
She looks at Sam who is not looking at her. He’s sitting up, the line of his neck and shoulder coloured blue from the false light outside. He’s not just convenient, but maybe she is using him. Because he is safe, because he is familiar. “So should I get dressed or not?" Brigitte finally asks, very soft and Sam laughs a little and says "Not?" like he's asking and _god_ she has all this affection for him that she doesn’t know how to handle.  
  
So she doesn’t get dressed. She drops her shirt back to the floor and when Sam doesn't move, she reaches out to him. He hesitates, but she doesn’t falter with her hand outstretched between them. So he goes to her.

**SAM**

_You said_ he thinks to himself _that you were here for her as a friend_. That wasn’t even a month ago, and here they are. Is this being a friend, he wonders. Can you do this with friends? He still doesn’t have the answer to that. Brigitte seems pretty confident. Or at least she’s confident that this is where she wants to be. That he’s who she wants to sleep with. He hopes that that means that they’re still going to be friends tomorrow but he doesn’t know how to ask that question. They’ve been hedging around this thing between them forever and he’s afraid that if they stop now, everything will change.

Is it selfish to want this? Is it shallow? Something heated and intimate and satisfying for maybe the better part of an hour, but that’s it. Then what? Then he loses her forever? To Ghost? To her other priorities? But Brigitte is steadfast and honest, and she curls her fingers around the back of his neck softly and christ, how does he say no to that? To her?

She’s never done this, he remembers, but it feels different, because she’s certain. She holds his hips still with one hand and she finds an angle that works, this soft slide of her body against him and it really takes an incredibly short time to find themselves back where they were, all breathless, and this ache that grips them both.

She stops him after a moment, breathing like she’s right on the edge just from this. Sam bites her lower lip because she’s got a beautiful mouth.

“You should get something,” she says, meaning protection, and he pulls back and he meets her eyes. And maybe she’s done this in other ways. He knows she doesn’t need a guy to be fucked or filled or brought off, but he…

“Is that how you want it?” he asks. 

It's her turn to raise her eyebrows. “It’s…” she begins, and then goes quiet as she starts to realize something, and Sam’s cottoning on. She thinks this only goes one way, but it doesn’t have to.

“This is fine, too. This is good,” Sam tells her.

“...Really?”

“Really," he assures her. "C’mon.”

She looks so skeptical, and Sam laughs. “C’mere,” he says, and reaches out, and they find their places side by side.

She lets him move against her this time, now that they’ve agreed to just this, and to be fair there’s a hint of pain. There’s a lot of friction but her mouth on his is enough to distract him, and it feels better than it doesn’t. And then she says _grab my hair_ against his mouth and he’s practically done in. He thinks that — as he takes a handful of it and she kisses him harder, making him pull on it as she presses into him — he thinks that this is a lot, that this is enough to bring him off, but then she reaches for his cock and brings it down to slide between her cunt and her closed thighs where she is wet and warm and _fuck_ Sam breathes, and feels her start to shake again.

That’s how they do this. She’s got her thighs clenched tight around his cock and Sam twists her hair a little as the kiss dissolves into something that’s a lot more breath and a lot less movement. Brigitte reaches down between them suddenly and with her hand, she presses him still harder against her and Sam whispers _jesus, oh fuck_ as he feels her come against him, her muscles contracting. It really doesn’t take him long after that. He pulls away a little because they never did get a condom, and he comes more between her thighs than against her, and she keeps her legs around him until he comes down.

She nudges him softly before she gets up, because she's still wrapped in his arms. He pulls back a little and she gets up out of the bed. He hears her in the bathroom as she cleans up, and then she’s back. She gets back into bed with him but doesn’t touch him. “Your apartment is warmer than mine.”

“It’s smaller than yours,” he tells her. He turns his head to look at her. She’s half sitting up. They lock eyes and she opens her mouth to say something, but he rushes to beat her to it. “You’re staying, right?”

**BRIGITTE**

She’s stayed the night once before, but that was sort of by accident, and not like this. But she says “okay,” because she wants to. Sam kisses her. That surprises her, because it’s not a means to an end. He kisses her with his fingertips just along her jawline and god, she feels like it wakes something in her, but then he pulls back to stand up, and repeat her journey to the bathroom.

When he gets back into bed, there’s all this space between them. And then he asks. “You always sleep this far away from everyone?”

“No,” she says, but she doesn’t know, with Sam.

“You want to come here, then?” he asks, but when she moves to go, he helps close the distance. They resettle, find where they fit together which ends up with her turned away from him, and Sam wrapped around her back. He holds onto her like Ghost does — like he needs contact as much as Brigitte does. It doesn’t feel like being held down. She feels him sigh against her shoulder and thinks that this doesn’t feel like a mistake.

She hopes that it will still feel the same at sunrise.


	8. Chapter 8

**BRIGITTE**

Waking up naked in Sam’s bed is not exactly something she let herself imagine, and so when it happens she is utterly unprepared, and it sends this thrill through her that she tries, immediately, to quell, but it wins anyway, pulsing low and insistent inside her, like a second heartbeat.

He isn’t used to sleeping with other people, and he rolled away from her in the night. Between falling asleep and the somewhere fireworks on someone’s rooftop that woke them both up at midnight, they slept soundly. The sound of New Year's celebrations startled them both. It startled her to wake up to Sam, Sam’s eyes in the dim light. Sam laughing low and half-annoyed, and then Sam kissing her again, an eternity between his fingers brushing along her jaw, and his mouth on her mouth. It was a slow kiss, she remembers that. She remembers thinking that it felt like it might lead somewhere, again, but it didn’t. Sam running his hand over her hair again and again. She thinks she fell asleep to that touch.

She knows they didn’t sleep all the way through the night, after the fireworks. Both too aware of one another, they woke up whenever the other one moved, but briefly. Her memory of it now feels like a cutting-room floor, all these bits and pieces and flashes of darkness and movement and half-formed thoughts.

He’s rolled away from her now, and she can’t see his face at all. The sun is slowly making its way across the wooden floorboards to the low mattress. He’s put it up on palates, she thinks, that he’s sanded down, and it’s only a few inches off of the floor.

She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. With Ghost, the first time, neither of them could really leave because they lived together first, before anything happened between them. And with Sam, she doesn’t want to go home without waking him, and she hates the intimacy of waking other people up. She half sits up and pulls her skirt towards her, fishing in her pocket for her phone. Ghost, she knows, is with Marcus, because it was New Year’s Eve, and there’s a _Happy New Year!_ message from her and, weirdly, Beth-Ann. Probably, Brigitte thinks, Beth-Ann was drunk and just collectively drunk-texted everyone in her phone. She touches the keys softly, thinking about responding to Ghost, but the time tells her it’s not even 7:30 yet, and she’s probably still asleep.

Looking for something to do, Brigitte’s eyes fall on the book Sam gave her, _Wide Sargasso Sea_. It’s just a thin little volume, and she hesitates a few minutes before she very carefully gets out of bed and goes to fetch it.

**SAM**

As the sun reaches the bed, Sam, lying on his stomach, pulls one of the pillows half over his head and hides from the light but, peripherally, he becomes aware of the presence of another person. There is a moment — a very brief moment — where he thinks that this is a stranger, someone he doesn’t know that he brought home that he’s now going to have to have a very awkward morning with, but then he remembers. He hears a page turn softly because, of course, Brigitte. And of course she’s already awake.

He turns his head towards her. She’s sitting up with her sweater on, but her legs bare beneath the blankets pooled around her hips. She’s about two thirds of the way through the book and she doesn’t look at him really, but her posture changes, a little more tense.

“Hi,” he says, very softly.

Brigitte says. “This book reminded you of me?”

“Yeah,” he says, voice still heavy with sleep.

Brigitte sort of half-smiles down at the book, like she feels bad for it. “It’s lonely,” she says.

“It’s like a storm,” Sam says. “Intense but, you know, beautiful. Too.”

Brigitte stares down at the passage she’s on. Maybe doesn’t know how to respond to that, maybe that was too much, and she feels differently about this whole situation than he does. He feels something knot in his gut until she begins to read aloud, softly, her voice so low some of her words break into almost-silence.

“ _‘She had lit all the candles and the room was full of shadows. There were six on the dressing-table and three on the table near her bed. The light changed her. I had never seen her look so gay or so beautiful. She poured wine into two glasses and handed me one but I swear it was before I drank that I longed to bury my face in her hair as I used to do. I said, ‘We are letting ghosts trouble us. Why shouldn’t we be happy?’ She said, ‘Christophine knows about ghosts too, but that it not what she calls them.’_ ”

They’re both very quiet after that and then Sam pushes himself up onto one elbow and asks her, “Did you ever think of me, after?” because he needs to know. Was he just as dispensable, after Halloween night, as he fears he is going to be, now?

Brigitte shuts the book and takes a long breath, and a long time to answer. “I didn’t,” she says, without looking at him. “You were dead, I thought. And I couldn’t… I had to stop living somewhere else. I _missed_ you, but I couldn’t because it was my fault. You care, Sam, but you shouldn’t. I don’t deserve it.”

“Bullshit,” Sam says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I could have told you to go back to the greenhouse, I could have handled it.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, maybe you could have, but I’m not dead. I’m not, I’m right fucking here.”

Brigitte closes her eyes and takes a long time to steady herself before she says “I spent all this time thinking that you’d given up your life for me. I thought ‘Now I can’t die,’ because of that. And I didn’t _want_ to, but jesus, Sam…” Sam sits up. Brigitte pulls away, creating more distance. She’s on the very edge of the bed, hiding behind her hair. “I had to make it Ghost. I had to fucking… get up for her every day, make sure she was all right and then there was Marcus and I… she doesn’t need me anymore, and I don’t know how to live for myself, I never have. And then you showed up again…”

Sam can pretty much fill in the blanks from there.

“I’ve only ever used you, you know that, right?” Brigitte says, and the words hit him like a punch to the gut, but there’s something hollow and cold in her voice that Sam hears, that he understands to some deep, dark centre of himself. It's the part that makes him drink all day, that makes him smoke too many cigarettes, that tells him that he’s not worth fucking anything. It’s the part that he has to remind himself a thousand times a day, is a liar. And it's in Brigitte, too.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he says.

She laughs, low and bitter and rolls her eyes, but she looks like she wants to cry. Sam just watches her, and for a moment, neither of them move. Finally he says, “Look at me and say it, then. Look me in the eye and tell me that again.”

She looks at him, filled with defiance and he holds her eyes and he knows that no matter how long it takes, he will never be able to brace himself fast enough. He can’t get any walls up around her at all. She looks at him, and the hardness drains out of her. She works her jaw against it like she’s trying to shape those words, but she can’t. She doesn’t.

She's tearing up, though. Sam can’t remember her crying, ever, and his fucking heart breaks.

“Why are you here?” she asks him, and her voice is almost, almost steady.

Here they are again, he thinks. He's gentle, though, when he says, “I told you already.”

“Then fucking actually say it,” she says. “Because I’ve been second guessing _all_ of this since you showed up again.”

She says it like she’s mad at him, like all of this is his fault. _That’s fair_, he thinks. They’ve both been trying to protect themselves, but maybe they don’t have to. Or maybe they do. He doesn't know, but he’s gone out on a limb for her before and, suddenly, saying it doesn’t feel that hard at all. “You’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met,” Sam begins, and then it just flows out of him. “Hell, you’re probably my best friend, and I know that’s _crazy_, but I don’t really like people. But you... fuck, I think we _have_ something. An understanding, or a— a connection? I mean, don’t we? I would do fucking _anything_ for you, Brigitte. I don’t know why you think any of what happened was your fault, but it _wasn’t_, jesus, you were a kid. You were both kids. It was fucked up and horrible and it shouldn’t have happened but it did, and I’m fucking sorry it did, but _Brigitte_, jesus. Jesus… you don’t have to keep all of it— around your neck.”

A sob breaks from her chest. Just one, but she wipes her face with one hand quickly, pulls herself together. She’s not going to believe him all at once, he knows. Things aren’t fixed like that, but he will remind her every fucking day if he has to. If she’ll let him. She nods to show she’s listening, that she understands, but she’s hiding and he doesn’t force her out from beneath her hair.

After a while she takes a deep breath and says “We are still friends, right? I mean, is that what we are, still?”

“Is that what you want?” Sam asks.

“Stop asking me,” Brigitte says, and looks up at him, holds his eyes. “What do _you_ want?”

Sam feels himself draw back a little. “I, uh,” he starts, but she doesn’t falter. She keeps her eyes on him and waits. Sam smiles, sort of. He feels it, even though his heart is pounding out this freaked rhythm like a frightened rabbit’s. “I dunno, I want… I want to do this again,” he says, indicating them, the bed. Her, reading. She’s lovely, he… “If you want to be like this, with me, that's what I want.”

She takes this little breath through her nose, deer in headlights. Sam feels like he’s looking back at her with pretty much the same expression.

“I…” She falters, looking around the apartment, looking lost.

“You don’t have to decide right now. I’m just… that’s what I think. I mean it was… it felt right, didn’t it?” He’s not entirely sure what he means by ‘right,’ just that it was good, and _nice_. “I mean we… it worked.”

**BRIGITTE**

She agrees, of course she does, because he’s right. It did feel right, but then she’s already got a thousand little prickles of doubt. There’s Ghost, for one thing, and she doesn’t know how to navigate herself if she’s with Sam, with a man. She doesn’t know who she is, then.

If she does this, what if _everything_ changes? What about Ghost?

“On the other hand,” Sam says, softer, “we can just leave things. We don’t… we can just forget this, if it’s easier.” That’s not what he wants. She can hear it in his voice, and something in her chest constricts when she thinks of just leaving this here. Of stopping their relationship — in whatever capacity — again, before it’s even had a chance to get started.

She shakes her head. “No, I want to. Keep this...” As she says it, she knows it’s not just because she’s trying to keep him with her. She’s starting to believe him when he says he’s not going anywhere. And Sam looks at her like he’s hopeful. He smiles at her, and it’s genuine — it’s not uncertain or uncomfortable or sarcastic. She thinks that she didn’t have very many chances to make him happy, before. It fills her chest, and it’s a lot at once. She takes a breath, shallow and quick and thinks about staying, for a split second she considers it, but she knows she can't. “I should go, though. Home.”

“Now?” he asks. He touches one of her hands, takes it in his, and his fingers are so warm. Her stomach swoops.

“I want to be there when Ghost…” she trails off a little as Sam leans close. He kisses her, just at the temple, one hand in her hair and she wants to stay, god, she wants to, but—

“Okay,” he says, drawing back. He lets her go. 

“You can come, I just… I want to be there.”

“_Should_ I come?”

Brigitte hesitates, because she’d prefer he didn’t if she’s honest, she wants the familiarity of just her and Ghost, and if they’re going to talk, it seems fairer if Sam’s not there.

He gets it, though, and he doesn’t make her turn him down. “No, that’s okay,” he says. “You go.”

“Thanks,” she says, relieved, then gets up and starts to get dressed. She wants to shower, she thinks, but not here.

When she’s dressed, and it’s just her sweater and her coat left she pushes her arms through the sleeves and tells him “I’m not just blowing you off,” before she pulls it on over her head. She can feel the static in her hair and she tries to smooth it to no avail.

“I know,” Sam says. “I’m used to it by now.” It’s a joke, but she feels bad, anyway. Uncertain about everything. He meets her eyes and maybe he sees some of that there in hers because he says, softer, “You know where to find me.”

~

As she steps back out onto the chill of the street she’s overcome by this feeling of freedom. Not from Sam, exactly, but freedom within herself. She feels almost happy. Almost. She’s relieved to be on her own again, and even though she meant to go straight home to Ghost, she wanders a little because it’s New Year’s Day and almost everyone is home, so the streets are nearly empty, and quiet. It’s a different sort of alone than the oppressive silence of her and Ghost’s apartment when it’s just Brigitte and her own ghosts. She gets coffee at one of the few open places and eventually makes her way home.

Ghost isn’t there but it’s not awful, not quite. And she knows that that has everything to do with… with how everything has gone. She moves through the space and pushes open the door to her bedroom and just stops there at the threshold. She takes it in. The sparsity of her bedroom, but all things she loves. Her camera on the trunk beside the bed, her books, the candles. Over her shoulder is the living room. Her photographs, Ghost’s drawings, the cacti they bought at Canadian Tire of all places, still sitting on the divide. Her life is here, she’s built it, with Ghost, and lately she’s felt like all of that was slipping between her fingers. But now, even if Ghost never shows up again, Brigitte has Sam. And she has _Wide Sargasso Sea_ at his place, and if she wants to, she could leave more things there, one by one, accidentally. A ring, her photographs, the tattered notebook in her bag she uses to write lists and reminders and ideas. This is how she knows how to be somewhere, how to permeate a place by leaving these physical pieces of herself so that the people she cares about will miss her when she’s away from them; so that they think of her, want her, sometimes… Probably, already, there’s strands of her hair, there’s the space in his bed where she slept, and the warmth will fade, but it still happened, it still lingers there, somewhere, in the fabric of the universe — _I was here, with you._ She knows that’s what she’s doing. Is that using him?

Is it using him if she really does want to try this with him? Whatever ‘this’ is?

She wanted to shower, she remembers, and she moves to the bathroom like she’s in a dream. She starts to undress, leaving a pile of her clothes on the floor and she catches her eyes in the mirror accidentally and stops. It’s been a long time since she looked at herself. Really looked, and not just found bits and pieces that looked like Ginger, or that looked like ‘Brigitte’ that she doesn’t like. But there she is, too thin, hair a mess of tangles and static. She looks pale, she thinks, and tired, and older than twenty-three. There are lines around her mouth, already, when she grimaces, which she does. But Brigitte likes her eyes because they’re almost the colour that Ginger’s were, but she will never have the complexion her sister had. Ginger had colour in her cheeks, she had a beauty mark on her left cheek and below her left eye that looked like someone had _thought_ about it. She had red hair that looked soft and almost golden at the temples. Brigitte has a bird’s nest of brown frizzing split-ends and a smattering of freckles across her nose that are so pale they look like an afterthought. She wonders what anyone sees in her. Ghost has always said that Brigitte has an ‘interesting face.’ Ghost has drawn her with strength in her wiry limbs, but she is all angles, like Ghost can see through her to just her bones, and the shapes her body makes. Brigitte looks at Ghost’s drawings of her and sees movement and sharpness, but not much else. 

She wonders if she looks different to Sam, now, than she did when they first met. Her clothes are darker — there’s no reds or blues or greens anymore. She knows she looks thinner, her face stripped of baby-fat so that, Brigitte thinks, she looks less like Ginger than ever, who always looked softer; like a painting — out of time, somehow, and beautiful. Or, Brigitte always thought so. Sometimes Brigitte wonders where she even came from. No one in the family even has wavy hair. If it weren’t for Ginger, she would be sure they took home the wrong kid. But she was so bonded to her, so certain that they shared the same blood, the same genetics, the same DNA. Ginger was her anchor to everything, to her whole life. Brigitte has been searching for that ever since, but she knows she will never find it.

It’s freezing when she gets out of the shower. The heat’s been down all night and she should have turned it up when she first got home, but it’s too late, now. She wraps the towel around herself, grabs her dirty clothes, and shuts the bathroom light off, crossing the living room to her own door.

“Hey.”

Brigitte barely keeps herself from screaming. She hisses out “jesus,” and her eyes fall on the palest outline of a figure. Ghost, in the kitchen. It’s dark in there, no lights on. “What are you doing?” Brigitte asks, her heart threatening to fucking kill her where she stands. Ghost flashes a blue screen at her. It’s the brightest thing in the room, and it illuminates her dark eyes for a second. “Using my phone. Where were you?”

“Sam’s. When did you get home?”

Ghost shrugs. “A few minutes ago.” She turns the stove light on, and that illuminates the kitchen a little. Brigitte can hear the light humming from where she stands. 

“I didn’t hear you,” she says. She’s shivering, but aside from that, neither of them move for a moment. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yup,” Ghost says. “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

Brigitte stares at her, standing there in the half-dark kitchen. Something’s wrong, something’s shifted, but she can’t think around the blood pulsing in her ears, so she turns away, pushes open the door to her own room and shuts it, almost completely, behind her. She tosses her clothes into the laundry basket and grabs something from her trunk of clean things to change into, dropping them onto the bed. She sheds her towel just as her door opens and Brigitte flinches. “Knock, please,” she tells her as she pulls on sweatpants quickly. Ghost passes behind her and sits on her bed.

“So what did you do with Sam?” Ghost asks, settling herself into a crosslegged position. “Were you there all night?”

“Does it matter? You were out with Marcus.”

“So this is like, what, a punishment?” Ghost asks.

Brigitte rounds on her, pulling her wet hair from the neck of her t-shirt. “Seriously?” she asks, incredulous. “_Why?_”

“I dunno,” Ghost says. “Just wondering.”

Brigitte looks at her for a long moment and Ghost fidgets and looks away and toys with the bedcovers. She looks back up, her expression as innocent as she can make it and Brigitte feels a surge of frustration. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you wanted me to be here, with you.”

That’s true, Brigitte thinks, but she wasn’t _mad_ about it. “So what? So you weren’t. I hung out with Sam instead.”

“Did you kiss him?” Ghost asks. “New Year's Eve, and all.”

Brigitte hesitates because as annoyed as she is, she wants to tell her, she should tell her. She said she would. Ghost is the closest thing she has, now, to a sister, and she will never replace Ginger, but for the longest time, she’s been all Brigitte had. Apparently her hesitation is enough because Ghost makes a face halfway between a smile and a smirk. “I knew you would.” She fans her fingers on the bedspread and smooths her palm across it like she is revealing a story there. “Across the land the bells rung out and people grasped hands and pressed their lips together in kisses that they thought would protect them from the cold winds of the place they called Faerie.”

Brigitte moves away, finding her hairbrush and beginning to rake it through her hair.

“They knew that if they didn’t clasp someone tightly, they would be swept away by the tide.” Ghost continues, speaking more and more rapidly, her eyes fixed on Brigitte now. “It’s easy, when the bells toll, to forsake all that you love, but you must be certain that the person you find _is_ human, isn’t an _illusion_—”

“Ghost, please,” Brigitte implores, and it comes out almost tired.

“That he isn’t going to take you from everything you know,” Ghost finishes, her voice rising with intensity, eyes still on Brigitte.

“He isn’t.”

“Men are dangerous.”

Brigitte rounds on her. “Did you tell that to Marcus?”

“He’s different.”

“_How?_” Brigitte asks. “How is he different?”

“He cares about me.”

Brigitte half smiles, all sarcasm, and rolls her eyes. “Get out, I have things to do.”

“Did you have sex?”

“Ghost.”

“You did. Did you let him get inside you?”

“_Ghost_.”

“_Because you never let me._”

Brigitte takes a deep breath, but she feels like her bones are starting to crumble. She wraps her arms around herself and gives Ghost her best glare. She feels her muscles contract under the tension, feels the jerk through her spine and her neck. She holds her ground.

Ghost slides off the bed slowly. “He won’t fuck you like that forever, you know,” she says. “He’s going to get tired of screwing you like a dyke.” She says it almost softly, and somehow that makes it worse.

Brigitte’s chest flares up hotly. She feels it all the way down her arms, in her cheeks. Her fingers twist and she takes a step forward to push Ghost out, bodily if she has to, but Ghost skitters out on her own. Brigitte slams the door behind her.

**GHOST**

Ghost jumps at the sound, but then stands there, frozen, in the quiet that follows. There isn’t a single sound from behind Brigitte’s door. If Ghost couldn’t practically feel the tension leeching out from beneath it like miasma, she might think there was no one there at all.

Something’s screaming in the back of her head. She starts to see the tension she feels, sliding out from beneath Brigitte’s door like smoke. Like when she burnt Barbara. The room had smelled like burning flesh and charred wood for weeks. Ghost couldn’t air it out. She smells it now like it’s clinging to the inside of her nose and she turns quickly and goes to the bathroom. She doesn’t turn on the light because she doesn’t want to see how freaked out she looks, but as she turns on the cold water to wash her face, get the burning smell out, she gets the sense that her reflection is looking at her. It’s watching her, even though Ghost’s head is down. Ghost reaches out fast and flicks the light on, and she’s there, looking normal. But Ghost is frozen, her eyes locked on her reflection's eyes. Like the second she looks away is the second it will move. She’s breathing very fast, she swallows, but her throat is tight. A wave of nausea rolls over her and she watches herself grow incredibly pale. Her eyes look like black holes in her face. They start to grow, expand, hollowing out her eye sockets. If she looks away to throw up, it will reach through the glass and grab her. Ghost bursts into tears without even realizing she’s done it. They streak hotly down her face. “Brigitte,” she whispers, and she doesn’t see her reflection move to speak. Terror has her in a chokehold and she screams it louder, before she runs out of breath entirely. “_Brigitte?!_”

There’s a sound, Ghost can’t look away from the mirror. She is so fixated on her reflection, hollow-eyed in the glass, that she doesn’t even see Brigitte come in, but then there are hands on her shoulders, on her arms. Someone says her name, and then the lights flick off. Ghost is released. She’s tugged from the bathroom and she goes, stumbling. She falls to her knees on the hallway floor and breaks into sobs. There are arms around her, but they are safe and she clings— clutches at Brigitte’s t-shirt, her wet hair, and cries into her shoulder, her sobs wrenched from the centre of her, and Brigitte says “You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay,” into her ear over and over again until Ghost believes it.

When she’s calmer, when she can breathe again, even though her breath shakes every time, Ghost pulls away. Her hair’s pulling loose from her braid and it sticks to her face. Brigitte wipes at it, wipes at her nose like Ghost is a child and Ghost turns her face away, but Brigitte has always been like that, never too grossed out by anything. Ghost has always felt like she could do anything, be any way in front of her and Brigitte would still care about her, still like her, and it is that that she is _terrified_ of losing. Brigitte pulls her up and walks her to the couch and plants her there, then goes into the kitchen. She never leaves Ghost’s sight. She tears off a sheet of paper towel and brings it to her and Ghost blows her nose, wipes her face with it. She can hear Brigitte in the kitchen again, and that’s safe, so Ghost presses her hands to her sore eyes until she sees lights behind her eyelids. 

She feels Brigitte sit down beside her a moment later. She hands her some tea which Ghost takes but doesn’t drink. She doesn’t look at her, just sniffles, holding tight to her cup.

“What happened?” Brigitte asks. Because, Ghost knows, it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.

“I dunno,” Ghost says, softly, but that’s a lie. She glances at Brigitte and then away. “I’m really scared. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t even know him, I don’t know if I can trust him—”

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte doesn’t answer for a moment, and then, finally: “That’s how I feel about Marcus. What if I wasn’t here just now, Ghost?”

“What if Sam makes you do things you don’t want to? What if he takes you away from me?”

“He won’t. I won’t go.”

“You can’t know that,” Ghost whispers.

“You can’t know that he will,” Brigitte says. It’s almost a retort, a defence of Sam, but her voice is soft. And it’s true, he tried to pull her away from Ginger, before. Just once, in the pantry. But there wasn’t much of Ginger left in that wolf outside the door. Brigitte knows that, now, but she couldn’t have then. “Anyway, I wouldn’t go. I told you.”

Ghost sets her tea down and leans into her and Brigitte turns her face into her pale hair. She smells like fear-sweat. Brigitte wraps an arm around her.

“Why couldn’t I just be in love with you, instead?” Ghost asks against her neck. Brigitte breathes a laugh, but it makes her ache a little.

“I don’t know. It would have been easier.”

Ghost laughs damply and wraps both of her arms around Brigitte, and Brigitte tenses and tries to make herself not. Her breath warm against Brigitte’s shoulder, Ghost says “I’m sorry I said that about him getting tired of sleeping with you. I didn’t mean that.”

Brigitte feels something cold wash through her, a stark contrast to the heat of rage she’d felt when Ghost had first said it.

“That’s okay,” Brigitte says, but she wonders… she wonders.

_What if you’re right?_


	9. Chapter 9

**BRIGITTE**

“So what happened?” Sam asks.

Brigitte shrugs one shoulder and then crouches to struggle with her laces which are soaked with snow and caked with salt from the sidewalks. “We went to Marcus’s. She told him about how fucked things can get for her sometimes. Marcus and I exchanged numbers. He’ll call me if anything goes wrong that he can’t handle… And then I left. I think she’s going to talk to him about the harder stuff.”

“How do you feel about that?”

She straightens up. “I don’t know. Better than before?”

“You can’t protect anyone all the time.”

She feels her stomach do something strange and she looks up at him. There’s a beat and she meets his eyes before he drops his own. Old wounds — she comes back to Ginger, always. She knows he didn’t mean it that way, but “Thanks. I know that,” she says. Better than either of them, she thinks. When he turns and goes into his apartment she follows him in, more tentative now. It feels, suddenly, like an intimate space.

“So, what now?” he asks her. He’s sitting in a chair at the window to smoke. It doesn’t match the set at the table and she wonders if he just picked it up from the end of someone’s driveway somewhere. He looks small, she thinks, and he’s busying himself with his cigarette and not really looking at her.

“What.”

“I mean… what about you?”

Brigitte looks him over. She’s kept several feet of space between them since she arrived and she doesn’t come any closer now. She thinks about how she’s been flip-flopping back and forth on this since he showed up again. She tells herself she doesn’t need anybody and then she turns straight into Sam’s fucking arms and wonders if she’s using him as a safety net. But he is so easy to feel safe with… he always has been… and yet. “I can take care of myself,” Brigitte hears herself say, like a broken record, and suddenly she wonders if she’s trying to convince Sam or herself. And then Sam stands up and she freezes. She watches as he crosses to her. There’s a cigarette burning between his fingers, but his hand is resting down by his side. 

“I know you can,” he tells her.

She bites her lip, not quite able to look him in the eye for a moment as she tries to work out at top fucking speed what the hell she’s doing here, what she’s trying to say. “I’m not here because I need you to do it for me.” Fuck, it’s like she’s broken or something. What she meant was…

“I know.”

What she meant was, “I’m not here because you’re second best.”

Sam hesitates this time, and then nods once, almost imperceptibly and it hurts her that he didn’t know that. She doesn’t know how to kiss him. With Ghost, they didn’t kiss. Not really. She knows the taste of Ghost’s mouth, but she knows the taste of her skin better. She wonders why it was that way between them. Her eyes leave Sam’s to follow the trail of smoke floating almost in a straight line, up from the cigarette in his fingers. She reaches for it and takes it from him. He’s barely holding it at all, so she slips it away from him easily, their fingers brushing. She keeps her head down as she takes a drag. Sam touches her hair, smoothing it down over the side of her neck and she sighs and steps into him, her forehead against his shoulder. And then he wraps his arms around her and it’s like she remembers what breathing is. Oh god. _Oh_, god, she needed _this_. The simplicity of it. The tension of that whole morning with Marcus melts away and she closes her fingers in his sweater near his spine and they stand there for a long time, not speaking. She lets the cigarette burn low at her side and she hears him swallow, once, but otherwise it is quiet. His face is turned into her hair and she can feel the soft flutter of it against the back of her neck as he breathes against her, and it’s like… like they were both waiting for _this_, and not the other night. Not the undressing and the build-up and release. Not the number of times they kissed until she lost count. Until things stopped being the third time she kissed Sam, and the fourth time she kissed him, and started just being kissing Sam. And Sam’s hands on her, touching her the way he touches everything: carefully, but certain and sure.

She’d felt safe, then, too but it’s nothing like this. This feels like…

She squeezes her eyes shut because she can’t even think it. Because then she thinks about how she almost lost him. And she thinks about how maybe having him here means that she had to lose Ginger, or it’s the other way around. Losing Ginger means he’s here. She could never have both. She doesn’t know why it has to be like that, or if it even is, but she’s needed someone for such a long time now, and Ghost always felt kind of like a little sister; like someone she had to protect. And maybe that’s fucked up, too, but she doesn’t know anymore, and she doesn’t fucking care. She doesn’t understand her place in the world, or how she fits into it. She doesn’t know why things are the way they are or why they’ve gone the way they’ve gone, but she knows that this feels… oh, Christ, she’s thought it now. She’s thought it by mistake: it feels like home. And every place she’s looked for home after Ginger but before now, it wasn’t this.

“You smell like the greenhouse.” It comes out muffled against his shoulder.

He laughs, and it sounds tight, and she moves to pull back and she feels him resist it, but then he lets her. She looks down at her hand and says “I have to put this out.” They’ve been so still, so quiet that the cigarette has burned to a long cylinder of ash, close to burning her fingers.

“Jesus,” Sam says. “Hang on, stay there.”

She holds it there, frozen, suspended in the centre of the room, and he comes back with an ashtray and she taps the ash off and suddenly it’s just… a cigarette. It disintegrated like that moment. And maybe that’s what moments are. You don’t even notice them until they’re gone. You don’t even realize how fragile they are. It doesn’t change that they happened.

Brigitte uses the time it takes to take the ashtray and butt out the cigarette, to take a breath. She sets it down on the windowsill and tries to think of the right thing to say. Her jaw works as she starts a couple of things, and then realizes that they’re not quite right, and then she’s been quiet too long and she starts to feel awkward. She half-watches Sam take out his cigarettes again in her peripheral and he opens the pack, then folds it shut again and says, softly, “Yeah, I really don’t know what to do here.” She can hear the smile in his voice and that helps. She smirks a little, looks up. There’s this heavy intensity between them, like a storm brewing — all closeness and heat, the air holding its breath in the moment before thunder.

She feels herself shake free from her stillness and, watching him, she touches her mouth, almost instinctively, just a brush of fingers against her lower lip before she really thinks through the movement. She’s thinking about the feeling of it more than the way to ask, more than the way she looks. Something half-startled flickers over Sam’s face, but then it’s gone because he’s cupped her face in both hands because she has a tendency, they learned, to duck away even when she doesn’t want to — always half-overwhelmed — and he kisses her.

**SAM**

He wonders why they never turn any lights on, but maybe it’s because it feels like germination. Before, they were already… established. As something. She was the outcast, she was Ginger’s sister, she was the girl who knew what a lycanthrope was, and he was the county dealer with the green thumb. The botanist that was otherwise a waste of space until she needed him for something. These days they meet after dark and they fucking… hold each other there, but he gets this feeling like maybe they’re starting to reach, to grow up towards the light together. He can’t really be sure; not _really_, but he hopes, and maybe that’s kind of enough.

It’s funny, he thinks, that it’s easier for them to shed their clothes and sleep together than it is to talk about what this whole thing means, and he wonders if that should be a warning sign or not. Still, he feels like they’ve always kind of understood each other and maybe it’s just different from what it was like before. Before, she was fifteen, and she had bigger things to worry about. And when he’d told her he didn't think of her that way, he’d wanted to mean it but, he knows now, probably hadn’t. He also knows what that says about him, but she was the first person he’d connected to in years — a teenage girl with a social aversion. At the time, when he’d said it, he’d believed it, kind of. He’d believed it until they were on their way to her house in his van with something not totally human in the back of his truck:

_“Then what?”_

_“Run.”_

_“You know you’re kidding yourself.”_

Because he wasn’t fucking going anywhere. Or he hadn’t meant to. He’s fucking glad he didn’t kiss her in the pantry back then. He’s glad it worked out like this, he just wishes that there was a hell of a lot less hurt in between.

~

They wind up in his bed again, and she’s the one who suggests he use something and he has to drag himself away from the intensity of their closeness. The impossible softness of her skin as he runs his fingertips over her ribs and then the softness of her breast, his teeth gently scraping the line of her jaw that’s hidden beneath her long hair most of the time. He wouldn’t’ve normally have asked if she was sure, but she’s never done this before, so he does ask. She responds with a soft push to his shoulder towards the edge of the bed and a low “yes,” so he listens. She’s no stranger to sex. She knows what she wants, she takes it, and he likes that. He’s shaking anyway as he rolls the condom on. It’s stupid, but it seems like— like jesus, it’s Brigitte Fitzgerald and also, he doesn’t deserve this, does he? To be the first guy? But, really, that’s up to her.

They take it so slowly. She’s watching him with these big, dark eyes and he thinks that if he was fucking smart he would have bought lube or something, but he just didn't assume…

He's about halfway inside her, and he can feel her tension and he runs his knuckles over the inside of her thigh, over her stomach. He says “Shhsh,” against her ear and she shivers, and shuts her eyes. He’s still for a while, letting her adjust to this. He feels her relax around him so slowly it’s like fucking cell by cell, and they lock eyes and christ, Sam thinks, christ, he loves her fucking hard but he’s not about to say it now because as soon as he moves in her she tenses again, and she’s still got these mean fistfulls of his bedsheets. “Okay,” he whispers, and he pulls out for a little while, half-soft because she’s clearly not enjoying this. He slides his fingers inside her, wet with saliva, and she keeps her legs open for him, but it's not good, he can feel that. She’s here but she’s drifting like she’d rather just… not.

“Hey,” he says, low, trying to pull her back to this room, to him. When she looks at him he kisses her and that’s better. Slowly, slowly her legs unclench and he’s got one hand moving over himself, trying to get hard again, and the heel of his other hand pressed against her clit and when she rocks up against him, he pulls his fingers out slick.

**BRIGITTE**

She doesn’t like his fingers inside her, but she likes the press of his hand against her, that warmth between her legs, and she likes how he kisses her. Fuck, she likes his mouth. When they try again though, for the second time it’s the same as before. It doesn’t even really hurt, it just kind of feels wrong, but she pulls him into her by the hips until he makes this helpless sound against her neck. Then it hurts a little, but she sees how it could fade, she understands what this is supposed to be like, but she knows that it’s never going to feel good for her. The press of him inside her translates to this heavy feeling. It weighs on her, pressing her down. She’s too warm, it’s too much pressure everywhere, and even though his breath hitches in his throat and he moves so so slowly and carefully inside her, even though it barely hurts, she starts to feel everything in her centre on the feeling of it. It's almost nauseating, and she pushes him away by the shoulders too suddenly.

“We can do something else,” he says. 

“No I want to.” She’s lying through her teeth and she doesn’t know why. “It’s just strange, that’s all.”

No, she does know…

_He’s going to get tired of screwing you like a dyke…_

But then his head is between her thighs, his hand spread out on her lower belly as he licks the length of her and ohchrist, _that_. She arches, groaning. He presses against her hard with his tongue and she holds him there by the back of the head, too hard. He lets her rock against him, against his mouth. She stops it before she comes, but by now she’s fucking aching for it.

They try a third time and it just pulls all the pleasure right out of her. There’s this hollowness there, this feeling like she’s pulling away even though she’s clenching the bedclothes to stay put, and she pulls in a breath, stomach pulling in, and she holds it there in her lungs, molars clenched. She squeezes her eyes shut because it has to get better, right? Just grin and bear it.

There’s this silence, this stillness. He’s looking at her and she can’t look back. She’s thinking _God, he knows I’m fucked up_, and then he says, “Okay,” and he pulls out of her so carefully. He’s got one hand around himself, and the other so softly against her face that she knows he’s not angry, but it still fills her up like ice. “I think let’s not,” he says.

“It’s fine, I’m fine—” He’s not listening though, because he takes the condom off and tosses it into the garbage nearby. 

“It’s not, though,” he says, and she can’t seem to unclench her fingers from the sheets. “If you don’t like it, it’s not.”

Frustration moves through her so fast it’s like a tidal wave. It rushes in her ears and Sam says “Here, Brigitte, c’mere…”

She doesn’t, can’t. She’s furious that she can’t do this, that Ghost is right, that her body just doesn’t want to listen to her head. Sam sighs and she shuts her eyes in frustration, humiliation. And then, in the midst of all that inner noise, he touches her wrist, and that’s better, but only a little. “Sorry,” she says to the blackness behind her eyelids, and it comes out almost breathless as all this anxiety presses against the walls of her ribs and she thinks of what Ghost said until it echoes. Until she thinks she might cry. He’s going to get tired of screwing you like a dyke. She wants, suddenly, to go home, but she found that place earlier in Sam’s arms, and so now she doesn’t know where to go. “Fuck, I’m sorry—”

**SAM**

She moves like she’s going to get up, and he grabs her hand to stop her. “Whoa, wait, why?” he asks, and then softer, “Why are you sorry, don’t be fucking sorry. Jesus, hey, don’t.” He moves to kiss her and she hunches her shoulder against him and turns her face away, so he hesitates, then kisses high on her cheekbone instead. “Brigitte…” he says against her temple.

She stills, but she doesn’t soften. She’s always been angles, this girl, so he’s not surprised, and for a while they’re quiet. He holds onto her hand, stroking his thumb against her knuckles. She’s still like she’s working on something, so he just stays quiet and lets her figure it out. The radiator ticks softly across the room in the dark for a while, and Sam thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind that he’s tired, and they are going to get cold just sitting up in bed like this, but he doesn’t want to say anything, he doesn’t even want to move, in case she changes her mind and doesn’t say anything after all.

Finally she says “What if… we never do that. I think I’m never going to like it, so… so, what happens if there’s never— if we don’t? Do that.”

He takes a second to make sure he’s got it. “If we don’t… nothing inside.” Half a question.

She nods.

“And before tonight? Last time? Was that okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

She looks at him, eyes uncertain. “Yeah,” she says. She says it like _Weren’t you there?_ and he kind of has to smile at her.

“Okay. Right— yeah. So, what do you mean ‘what happens’? Nothing happens, there’s like a thousand other ways we can do this.”

Brigitte’s quiet, not quite looking at him, but he can see her eyelashes flickering in the half-light as she thinks. “I can only think of like four,” she says and he laughs softly.

“Great. Let’s— we can do all of those.” 

She gives him a look. “Honestly, you won’t get tired of that?”

She says it like _You won’t get tired of me?_ and Sam’s suddenly dead serious. “Honestly, I don’t really care all that much as long as you’re here,” he tells her, and he fucking means it. “Like, at all.”

Brigitte exhales and it sounds like relief. She nods, and then she reaches for him.

~

Afterwards, sometime between the soft quiet of midnight and the impossible darkness of three a.m., Sam says “A while back, when you said you weren’t really looking…”

Brigitte’s quiet. He hears her silence change beside him and turns to look at her, because sometimes what Brigitte does — with her eyes, with her fingers, with the way she meets his eyes or doesn’t — that tells him more than her words do. She keeps those to herself, most of the time.

“I think I meant that a lot like you saying you didn’t think of me that way.”

And that— he knows exactly what that means. It means _I never meant to, but here we are. _

“You know I… I didn’t mean to show up and upend your life,” Sam begins, but doesn’t really know how to finish.

“I think my life needed something like this to happen.”

“So what happens now?” Sam asks her. Breathes it through the darkness, and the words hang over them thickly, like pot-smoke.

“Sometimes,” Brigitte says, “I think I’ve never loved anyone but my sister.”

And Sam, he thinks, _I’ve never loved anyone at all, until you showed up_, and he wonders why neither of them can say it. What he says instead is “I know that you don’t want to have to rely on anyone, and that you can take care of yourself, I’ve seen you do it but, you know… I’m here. I’m always here, if you need… you know… anything.”

She’s quiet, but he watches her nod. Her fingers are cold when she finds his in the darkness and she wraps them around his palm. He holds on tight and she says “Same for you.”

**BRIGITTE**

She thinks that maybe it works like a circle. If he’s there for her, if she just _knows_ that, she can be strong enough to take care of herself, maybe even without his actual help. And if she can do that, she can be strong enough to look out for him, too, even though Sam’s never asked her for much of anything. She still wants to be there. And maybe if he ever needs anything in the future, he’ll know she’s there for him, and it will just keep going around and around like that, forever. Maybe she can be strong enough for Ghost, too. Maybe she can be strong enough to let her go, because Ghost is ready to be let go. 

Somehow Brigitte sort of finds the cycle of it comforting. Like maybe this way she can move between ways of existing fluidly. Like maybe she doesn’t have to be so caught between not wanting to need anyone, and needing someone so desperately it makes her bones feel like they’re being squeezed so hard they ache. “Thank you,” she adds, a little too brusque, but she’s always been bad at things like this.

But she’s learning, she thinks, that her whole world doesn’t have to spin around one person like they’re the sun. That was her mistake, back then with Ginger, and she couldn’t even save her. It was her mistake with Ghost, keeping her too close. In a way, she became like Ginger, turning Ghost away from everyone else so that she would just… stay. She hopes that letting her go now isn’t too late. She was just trying to feel here. To feel real in a way she hasn’t felt here since she left her basement bedroom, for the very last time, without her sister. And all at once, she realizes that that’s it. That maybe she doesn’t have to hold on so tight. That letting people go is the way they stay with you.

And that maybe letting people get close won’t destroy her.

God, it scares her. But… she uncurls her fingers from his, and her knuckles protest a little at how tight she was holding. “Sam?”

“Hm?” He rolls into her, and he is warm.

It takes a lot to say it, but she wants to. She wants to do better, this time around, even if she’s still working out how to do that. “What do we call this?”

“I thought you call it ‘an arrangement,’” he says, but there’s something in him, this tension, this want. He touches her shoulder like a question as she turns into him, her head beneath his chin.

“You wanna be something different?” She feels the way her question moves through him, this rush and she runs her fingertips over the notches of his spine near the back of his neck and realizes that she doesn’t feel scared of his answer, no matter which way it goes, because he’s not disappearing on her either way.

“Fuck,” he says, “Okay.”

And it’s so genuinely earnest that she smiles, and it’s easy, her head tucked down beneath his, the darkness around them. Maybe he feels it though, because she feels him exhale like laughter into her hair: “Yeah, okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for your infinite patience while I literally upped sticks and changed towns, and fucking struggled through life as I wrote these last two chapters. I appreciate each and every one of you who has read this far. thank you.
> 
> p.s.: as always, write/be the weird queered sex you want to see in the world. absolutely fuck gender and societal norms forever. There's a lot of character thoughts in this text: am I fucked up? am I not normal? am I broken? You are _not_ bad or fucked up or broken. Sex (or never having sex, or sometimes having sex like once every 10 years) is valid and beautiful and multi-faceted and mutable. Find what feels right in your heart and do that.  
These characters are not perfect. they are broken and healing (a little crookedly, sometimes) but they are _trying_ to be better, and that is the best that we can do. and maybe we will never be perfect or find the perfect partner, but we can do our best, and find someone willing to do their best for us, and i hope that all of you find that. keep on keeping on, sweethearts.  
i see you out there, and you are lovely.


End file.
